Posts Tagged ‘poetry’
“The path to paradise begins in hell”*…
It’s been over 700 years since Dante Aligheri found himself, midway along the journey of his life, within a dark forest. His terza rima epic, The Divine Comedy, rivets us still…. and as Hunter Dukes recounts, raises questions…
Ever since the publication of Dante’s Divine Comedy, scholars and artists have tried to map the Inferno’s architecture, survey Purgatory, and measure their way across the spheres of Paradise. The first cosmographer of Dante’s universe was the Florentine polymath Antonio Manetti, whose unpublished research — which mathematically concluded that hell was 3246 miles wide and 408 miles deep — inspired the woodcuts used for a landmark 1506 edition of the poem. In 1588, a young Galileo weighed in, deriving Lucifer’s height and armlength (1200 and 340 meters respectively) and suggesting that the Inferno’s vaulted ceiling was supported by the same physical principles as Brunellesci’s dome. The scholarly tradition continued for centuries, culminating with the works of Michelangelo Caetani, who designed a series of maps and charts. These were published as The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Described in Six Plates and appeared in two editions, an 1855 edition featuring hand-colored lithographs and an 1872 edition printed using an early form of chromolithography, deployed by an order of monks at Monte Cassino near Rome…
Learn more about Caetani and his approach, and see more of his work: “Diagramming Dante: Michelangelo Caetani’s Maps of the Divina Commedia,” from @hunterdukes in @PublicDomainRev.
* Dante Alighieri
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As we chart cosmology, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that Michael Hart launched the source of the link to The Divine Comedy embedded above, Project Gutenberg, and effectively invented ebooks. It debuted on ARPANET.
An online library of free ebooks, it currently has over 70,000 items available (in plain text as well as other formats, such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and Plucker wherever possible).
“We live in an age when the traditional great subjects – the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism – are daily devalued by commercial art”*…
… But it wasn’t always so. A current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York is devoted to the work of (often anonymous) artists who illustrated commercial catalogs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries…
Art of Commerce: Trade Catalogs in Watson Library features a selection of the library’s extensive holdings of sale catalogs. Watson Library has almost two thousand trade catalogs published in many countries from the eighteenth century to the present. Objects featured include furniture, jewelry, tiles, ironwork, glasswork, lighting, stoves, tableware, textiles, decorative paper, artist’s materials, fashion, typography, automobiles, and musical instruments. Numerous catalogs illustrate works of art or related objects now in The Met collection.
The library has strong holdings of Art Deco trade catalogs including Modern furniture design = Le dessin moderne des meubles—a colorful furniture portfolio by Czech architect Karel Vepřek—and Van Clef Arpels présentent, an elegantly illustrated accessories publication designed by Draeger Frères, the most innovative graphic designers and printers of the period. Both catalogs are on display in the exhibition.
Trade or sale catalogs — also called commercial or manufacturer’s catalogs —are printed publications advertising products of a particular trade or industry. Sale catalogs were often used in shops or showrooms to promote a company’s products. Examples include the massive Reed and Barton catalog Artistic workers in silver & gold plate from 1885 that illustrates the entire inventory of the company…
Among the more unusual and appealing trade catalogs in the exhibition is a German Art Nouveau-inspired cake decorating book from 1910 and a baby carriage catalog from 1934 offering Art Deco styled tubular steel baby prams. These trade catalogs demonstrate the distillation of major art movements applied to quotidian objects.
The earliest trade catalog in the exhibition is Muster zu Zimmer-Verzierungen und Ameublements, a neo-classical interior design catalog by luxury German manufacturer Voss und Compagnie, offering entire rooms that can be bought en masse or as separate pieces. It is illustrated with richly toned hand-colored engravings that detail the design and color of the objects.
One of the library’s most fragile and weighty catalogs is Album des principaux modeles de verres: produits spéciaux en verre coulé. It is a magical trade catalog with sixty-five intact glass samples manufactured by French glassmaker Saint-Gobain. Founded during the time of Louis XIV, the company remains a manufacturer of glass for construction.
The majestic ironwork catalogue of Maison Garnier has pink-tinted papers and was bound in Morocco leather as a special copy for Rémy Garnier, the son of the firm’s founder. The firm’s initials are boldly blind stamped on the cover.
The most unusual and perhaps unexpected catalog, Urinoirs, illustrates the decorative ironwork structures of urinals (or pissoirs) that adorned the streets of Paris from the 1840s to the mid-twentieth century. The ornamentation of these structures demonstrates an impulse to beautify the animated street life of Paris and other cities…
See the items mentioned at the links above, and other articles in the exhibit here.
Beauty in the service of business: “Art of Commerce: Trade Catalogs in Watson Library,” from @metmuseum (where one can see the works on exhibit through March 4, 2025).
* Andy Warhol
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As we browse, we might spare a thought for Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde; the novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and master of the bon mot died on this date in 1900.
As he said: “There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.”
“We moralize among ruins”*…
Via The Guardian…
Photographer Phillip Buehler, who captured the death of the American mall in a 2022 photo series, has a new exhibition of pictures from the last 50 years that trace the often forgotten history of the islands surrounding Manhattan. No Man Is an Island: Poetry in the Ruins of the New York Archipelago is now on show until 23 June at the Front Room Gallery in Hudson, New York…
All photos by Phillip Buehler (and here). More of this series: “The inaccessible and abandoned islands of New York – in pictures,” via @guardian.
And for companions to Buehler’s earlier series on abandoned malls, see here and here.
* Benjamin Disraeli
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As we ponder passage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878, the original Tay Bridge was officially opened by Queen Victoria. It carried a single rail line across the Forth of Tay on the east coast of Scotland. At almost 2 miles in overall length, it was the world’s longest bridge at the time.
It’s designer, Sir Thomas Bouch, a railway engineer and executive, was knighted for engineering and overseeing the building of the bridge— on which an estimated 75 people died when, the following year, unable to withstand high winds, it collapsed. An enquiry found Bouch to be liable, by virtue of bad design and construction; he died four months after the verdict.
Bouch and his creation are thus also indirectly responsible for the best-known poem, “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” by the gentleman widely considered to have been the worst published poet in British history, William Topaz McGonagall (and here).
“Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth”*…
L. M. Sacasas in admiration of the ambulatory…
A few weeks back I shared a few lines from Kierkegaard about the virtues of walking. “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,” Kierkegaard advised a friend in despair. “Every day,” he went on to say, “I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” This struck me as good counsel.
Since then, I’ve serendipitously encountered a handful of similar meditations on the value of walking, so I’ve taken that as sign to briefly gather some of these together and offer them to you, chiefly because they collectively remind us that there is a scale of activity and experience appropriate to the human animal and things tend to go well for us when we mind it…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Ambling Mind,” from @LMSacasas.
(Image above: source)
* Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
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As we wander, we might spare a thought for Francisco de Sá de Miranda; he died on this date in 1558. A poet of the Portuguese Renaissance, he introduced the sonnet, the elegy, the ottava rima, and relevantly to the piece above, the eclogue to Portuguese letters, adapting the Portuguese language to the Italian hendecasyllable verse. These forms were later used by many Portuguese poets including Luís Vaz de Camões, the Portuguese language’s greatest poet.
“He offered alternative facts”*…
When reach exceeds grasp (in both senses of the word), from @ryanqnorth in Dinosaur Comics.
* Kellyanne Conway (defending Sean Spicer)
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As we have it our way, we might we might send an amusing birthday verse to Ogden Nash; he was born on this date in 1902. A poet best known for his light verse, Nash wrote over 500 pieces published, between 1931 and 1972, in 14 volumes. At the time of his death in 1971, he was, The New York Times averred, “the country’s best-known producer of humorous poetry.” The following year, on his birthday, the U.S. Postal service celebrated him with a commemorative stamp.
- Candy
Is Dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.- “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” in Hard Lines (1931); often misattributed to Dorothy Parker
- It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant…- “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man” in The Family Album of Favorite Poems (1959)
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