The Fugitive Beauties of Hexandria

"An endeavour to preserve some memorial of the brilliant and fugitive beauties, of a particularly splendid and elegant tribe of plants, first gave rise to this work; and having enjoyed considerable, perhaps unusual, advantages, in the very great liberality with which specimens were supplied, both from public, and private collections, it became a favourite recreation, to describe them as simply and naturally as possible, with both pen and pencil.

Having no pretensions whatever, either to scientific knowledge, or extensive research, any attempt at a lengthened technical descriptions, is purposely avoided [...and the artist/author...] relies on the indulgence and courtesy of those more able and learned promoters, or generous admirers of botanical pursuits, who may be induced to patronize the feeble attempts, of an Amateur." [from the preface]

Amaryllis belladonna

Amaryllis correiensis

Amaryllis crocata

Amaryllis fulgida and Crinum giganteum

Amaryllis miniata and Pancratium speciosum

Amaryllis psittacina

Amaryllis solandriflora

Crinum augustum

Crinum declinatum

Crinum erubescens and Amaryllis superba

Crinum scabrum

Pancratium amboinense

Priscilla Susan Bury [née Faulkner or Falkner and often cited as 'Mrs Edward Bury'] (~1790s-1869) was a self-taught watercolour artist who sketched exotic plants from her father's greenhouses on their estate near Liverpool, England, where she grew up.

Encouraged by a local botanist, William Rowe, and enlisting the technical expertise of staff at the Liverpool Botanical Gardens to assist with the accompanying text, Bury set about preparing a book of fifty one 'portraits' (as she called them) of her favoured Hexandrian species. These are a Linnean class of plants having six stamens, including lilies, hippeastrums, crinums and pancratiums.

The partially hand-coloured aquatint engravings of Bury's drawings were produced by the workshop of Robert Havell, who were working on the plates for JJ Audubon's extravagant series, 'Birds of America' at the same time. Audubon himself was one of the seventy nine subscribers to Bury's book which was released over three years beginning in 1831. The modest circulation numbers makes Bury's exquisite Hexandrian plant series a very rare and desired botanical publication. Not bad for an Amateur.

The only other works of note I discovered by Priscilla Susan Bury included artistic contributions to Benjamin Maund's 'Botanic Garden' and 'The Botanist' in the 1840s, but years later her drawings of microorganisms, including some Radiolaria, were published in a very early photographic plate book, 'Polycistins'.

'A Selection of Hexandrian Plants, Belonging to the Natural Orders Amaryllidae and Liliacae' is online at Botanicus, the Illustrated Garden, NYPL (easy to see all the plates) or the (new to me) commendable multinational collaborative Biodiversity Library. [all identical, save for the NYPL version]

The detail (as opposed to full page) illustrations above are all spliced together from screencaps and the age-related spotting and text bleed-through has been removed or subdued.

The chain: this post was largely inspired by an entry seen on the Princeton University Graphic Arts Division blog which was found through the Museum Blogs aggregator site which is produced by the Ideum group who are responsible for some significant web projects.

Sources for this entry: i, ii, iii, iv, v.

Wondertooneel der Nature

The collection obsession of Early Modern Europe, that saw people stocking cabinets of curiosities ('wunderkammer' or 'rariteitenkabinet') with obscure and exotic trinkets and specimens from the worlds of 'artificialia' and 'naturalia', emerged in Holland under a local profile of influences.

Unlike most of their European counterparts, the Dutch republic lacked both a royal court or any sizeable aristocracy, so collecting was a hobby cultivated by regular citizens. We tend to regard the 17th and 18th century craze as being dominated by the well to do types [such as Levinus Vincent (images above) and Albertus Seba (images below)] because they were the enthusiasts who could afford to have their collections recorded for posterity in book engravings and warranted visitor books for their proto-museums or had their inventory itemised in sales documents.

But in 'The Travels of Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach' from 1711, for instance, which outlined the author's assessment of a large number of cabinets in Lower Saxony, Holland and England, there are numerous descriptions of collections - often modest in size, of course, by comparison to those of the wealthy - developed by Dutch carpenters, merchants, tradesmen and artisans. The enthusiasm for collecting, in Holland at least, traversed all strata of society, but with the most notable collections owned by burghers and regents, in contrast to the kings, nobles and prelates of other European countries. And there is the rub. It was customary for families to sell off these 'rariteitenkabinets' and divide the spoils following the death of the collector. Accordingly, most Dutch collections of significance left the country, purchased by foreign nobility and no intact collections have survived; adding an interesting element of documentary detective work to scholarly assessments.

Amsterdam was a hub for commercial shipping - it was the chief domestic port of the Dutch East India Company - and had long established markets and auction houses that provided people with relatively easy access to exotic objects brought back by sailors from all corners of the globe. One can speculate that the sales themselves were an important means by which information about collecting was disseminated. Doubtless too (in my mind at least), Holland had already cultivated that collection mentality to some extent in the early 17th century with the enthusiastic (mania) appreciation and trading of tulips*.

The religious traditions of the various Protestant sects, with their inclination towards an austere lifestyle, circulated a distaste for the man-made novelties, ornaments and marvels of 'artificialia' while at the same time, paradoxically (perhaps), encouraging a passionate interest in collecting items from the world of 'naturalia' (the God-made novelties). The fact that curating and displaying the objects became an artform in itself, more properly ascribed to the motivations behind 'artificialia', was undoubtedly a moot point to the faithful.

It has only been in the last twenty years or so that any serious scholarship has been undertaken in relation to the the collecting history for Dutch 'rariteitenkabinets':

"[H]istorian Roelof van Gelder distinguishes five different motives which, [to] varying degrees, played a role in inspiring Dutch citizens to build up a collection. Firstly, the possessor of a rich and beautiful cabinet could acquire a good reputation, because he could be sure of important guests entering his house. Secondly, the collected valuables could serve simultaneously as merchandise and as investments. Thirdly, the collected objects, besides contributing to the collection, could generate a certain aesthetic satisfaction. Fourthly, the religious consideration that man could learn to know God better through the study of of his Creation played a substantial role for some Dutch collectors. As a fifth reason van Gelder mentions scientific curiosity, deriving from the humanistic ideal of the universal scholar."

Obviously I have hardly scratched the surface. The majority of information provided here was gleaned from the excellent 2004 journal article by Bert van der Roemer from the University of Amsterdam. The long-ish but very readable article is available online from Harvard University: 'Neat Nature: The Relation between Nature and Art in a Dutch Cabinet of Curiosities from the Early Eighteenth Century' IN: History of Science, vol. 42, p.47-84.


The images above come from a 2-volume work (1706-1715), 'Wondertooneel der Nature', by the Dutch cloth merchant, Levinus Vincent (1658-1727), whose spectacular 'rariteitenkabinet' was established in Amsterdam and later moved to Haarlem where it was subsequently auctioned off after Vincent's death and incorporated into other collections.

A pdf article - 'Scientific Symmetries' by EC Spary [IN: History of Science xlii (2004)] - gives a little more insight into the background:

"Rather than presenting himself as the author, Vincent sought to use the printed page as a way of displaying the authorship of the natural world. Descriptions of his remarkable collection and copper-plate engravings intervened between odes to God and His Creation — and to Levinus Vincent and his — written by visitors to the Cabinet numbering amongst Vincent’s friends. [..]

The first, 'Wondertooneel der Nature' (Theatre of Nature’s Marvels), appeared in 1706. Most of the subsequent descriptions of his collection differed largely in the number of eulogizing poems or the length and detail of the description of specimens, and are not clearly identifiable as separate books. [..]

For Vincent and his circle, these publications served a mediating function in the interpretation of the cabinet. No-one, gazing upon the multiplicity of natural productions, could fail to worship God in His Creation. The readership was divided into 'Liefhebbers', or lovers of natural productions and of God, and atheists, who were alternately bidden to “come before the light, and learn ... in all these works to observe the actions of the Supreme Artist” or to keep quiet: “Every animal has a tongue, to find out your guilt against you.”

As in other late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural histories, butterflies and other metamorphosing insects became analogies for the Christian transfiguration of the human body at the Resurrection; Vincent boasted that his cabinet contained every species described in Maria Sibylla Merian’s book on the subject."

• The Vincent images were obtained from 'Wondertooneel der Nature' but are identical to those found in the later (shorter) 'Elenchus tabularum' - all are available from the Universities of Strasbourg.
• The cropped images above were uploaded (uncropped) to Wikimedia in the same high resolution format as at the Strasbourg site.
• Antiquarian books on 'Wondertooneel der Nature'.
• In passing, I came across a recommended read: 'Museum Manners: the Sensory Life of the Early Museum' by Constance Classen of Concordia University [IN: Journal of Social History, published 22 June 2007] - which paints a strangely interesting sensorial picture of the way people interacted with the early museum culture in Britain. Uffenbach was fairly critical of the quality of some the British cabinets of curiosities - note that the first University museum in the world was established in 1683: The Ashmolean Museum (or should that be The Tradescant?)
• NYPL Cabinet of Curiosities link collection.

Tribes of Burma

"There is in this particular region a collection of races
diverse in feature, language and customs such as cannot,
perhaps, be paralleled in any other part of the world".
[Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, Sir George Scott, 1899]

"We shall never be able to trace all the people who
now inhabit Burma back fully to their original seats,
or say precisely where they had their beginnings".
['The Tribes of Burma', C.C. Lowis, 1919]

Kaw (Ahkra)

Kaw (Si-Saw)

Tai-Loi (Hsen Suni)

Lihsaw

Muhso (Lahu-Na)

Tai

Kwi (Lahu-Hsi)

Tai-loi (Hsam Tao)

Wa

Yang Hsek

Hkun

We are told:

"A Hand Painted Manuscript, in Color, of the Kaw, Lahu, Kwi, En, Ahko, Hpin, Tai-Loi, Yang Hsek, Palawng, Kachin, Wa Lu, Lem, Tai-no, Lisaw, Hkun and Tai tribes. Hand drawn, hand colored ethnographic manuscript showing people from various ethnic groups in Burma at their daily chores and in their native costume, ca. 1900."

The 'Tribes of Burma' manuscript comes from the South East Asia Digital Library at the Northern Illinois University Libraries, Special Collections. [homepage] All the above images were modestly background cleaned and are screencaps taken from djvu files at 100%.

Major Ethnic Groups of Burma
Date: 30 June 2006 Source: ReliefWeb

'Chronic Emergency - Health and
Human Rights in Eastern Burma'
{Executive Summary} Published in 2006
Back Pack Health Worker Team - An agency from Thailand [Source]

"Disinvestment in health, coupled with widespread poverty,
corruption, and the dearth of skilled personnel have resulted in the
collapse of Burma’s health system. Today, Burma’s health indicators
by official figures are among the worst in the region. However,
information collected by the Back Pack Health Workers Team
(BPHWT) on the eastern frontiers of the country, facing decades of
civil war and widespread human rights abuses, indicate a far greater
public health catastrophe in areas where official figures are not
collected.

In these eastern areas of Burma, standard public health
indicators such as population pyramids, infant mortality rates, child
mortality rates, and maternal mortality ratios more closely resemble
other countries facing widespread humanitarian disasters, such as
Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, Angola,
and Cambodia shortly after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge.

The most common cause of death continues to be malaria, with over
12% of the population at any given time infected with Plasmodium
falciparum, the most dangerous form of malaria. One out of every
twelve women in this area may lose her life around the time of
childbirth, deaths that are largely preventable. Malnutrition is
unacceptably common, with over 15% of children at any time with
evidence of at least mild malnutrition, rates far higher than their
counterparts who have fled to refugee camps in Thailand. Knowledge
of sanitation and safe drinking water use remains low.

Human rights violations are very common in this population.
Within the year prior, almost a third of households had suffered from
forced labor, almost 10% forced displacement, and a quarter had
had their food confiscated or destroyed. Approximately one out of
every fifty households had suffered violence at the hands of soldiers,
and one out of 140 households had a member injured by a landmine
within the prior year alone. There also appear to be some regional
variations in the patterns of human rights abuses. Internally displaced
persons (IDPs) living in areas most solidly controlled by the SPDC and its allies, such as Karenni State and Pa’an District, faced more
forced labor while those living in more contested areas, such as
Nyaunglebin and Toungoo Districts, faced more forced relocation.
Most other areas fall in between these two extremes. However,
such patterns should be interpreted with caution, given that the BPHW
survey was not designed to or powered to reliably detect these
differences.

Using epidemiologic tools, several human rights abuses were
found to be closely tied to adverse health outcomes. Families forced
to flee within the preceding twelve months were 2.4 times more likely
to have a child (under age 5) die than those who had not been forcibly
displaced. Households forced to flee also were 3.1 times as likely
to have malnourished children compared to those in more stable
situations.

Food destruction and theft were also very closely tied to several
adverse health consequences. Families which had suffered this
abuse in the preceding twelve months were almost 50% more likely
to suffer a death in the household. These households also were 4.6
times as likely to have a member suffer from a landmine injury, and
1.7 times as likely to have an adult member suffer from malaria,
both likely tied to the need to forage in the jungle. Children of these
households were 4.4 times as likely to suffer from malnutrition
compared to households whose food supply had not been
compromised.

For the most common abuse, forced labor, families that had
suffered from this within the past year were 60% more likely to have
a member suffer from diarrhea (within the two weeks prior to the
survey), and more than twice as likely to have a member suffer from
night blindness (a measure of vitamin A deficiency and thus
malnutrition) compared to families free from this abuse.
Not only are many abuses linked statistically from field
observations to adverse health consequences, they are yet another
obstacle to accessing health care services already out of reach for
the majority of IDP populations in the eastern conflict zones of Burma.

This is especially clear with women’s reproductive health: forced
displacement within the past year was associated with a 6.1 fold
lower use of contraception. Given the high fertility rate of this
population and the high prevalence of conditions such as malaria
and malnutrition, the lack of access often is fatal, as reflected by
the high maternal mortality ratio—as many as one in 12 women will
die from pregnancy-related complications."

• Online Burma/Myanmar Library - Ethnic Groups in Burma (cultural, political). [homepage]
• The CIA World Factbook.
• Human Rights Watch.
• Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative (Soros Foundation).
• Daw Aung San Suu Kyi pages.
• Previously.
• 'The Vanishing Tribes of Burma' by Richard K Diran 1999. [article]
  

The 60th anniversary since Burma achieved independence from Britain passed by on 4 January 2008. There doesn't seem to be a great deal to celebrate.

Half Life

Illustration © Jeremiah Maddock as seen on:
my love for you is a stampede of horses [via Elly Yap].

The famous Wound Man* together with the anatomy and phlebotomy diagrams and the urine 'connoisseurs' illustrations [see also: Tabula Urinarum] come from a collection of medical treatises from South Germany compiled into the one manuscript and dated from about 1460 - Codex Palatinus Germanicus 644 at the University of Heidelberg (click "Bll. 1-50" and then the "-" sign at the top of the page to view the thumbnail images).

By way of addendum (and very slight erratum) to the BibliOdyssey Book (p.133), this picture of the Wound Man predates the earliest printed version of the iconic medical schematic by more than thirty years. The version above is certainly (?!) the oldest version online.

I read in passing that this recurring profile of iconographic forms - zodiac man*, wound man, phlebotomy man et al - are thought to derive originally from manuscripts going back to the 13th century. The oldest printed version of the Wound Man is to be found in the 1491 latin edition of 'Fasciculus Medicinae' by Johannes de Ketham - notable for being the oldest printed book containing any anatomical illustrations, a book Leonardo was said to have owned/consulted. {See: here and here.}










Never let it be said that oceanographers don't have a sense of humour. These caricatures were found among the 10,000 photographs at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives at the University of California, San Diego. I seem to recall finding a few other oddities - Marshall Islands nuclear explosion greeting cards and the somesuch.




This engraving by Dietrich Meyer from about 1650 falls within the realm of emblemata and comes replete with a range of puzzling allegorical motifs. It's (I think) ostensibly saying that the Bishop's thorny path up the pyramidal obelisk of virtue affirms the victory of life over death. (And/Or?)

The good Sir Knight battles the Whore of Babylon* and the seven vices.
The engraving from 1653 is by Conrad Meyer.

Joseph's dream of his triumph in Egypt (?) - an engraving from
1564 by Dirck Volkertsz from a design by Marten van Heemskerck.

Known as 'Triumph Hiobs' (I presume Hiobs = Job, a la Old Testament),
this 1564 engraving is also by Dirck Volkertsz/Marten van Heemskerck.

These all come from the very interesting graphics collection at the Danube University Krems in Austria. (best way to view things is via the search - 'suchen' - page with easy to follow drop down menus). Although I would say that the collection tends to be predominantly religious in nature, it is more geared towards the allegorical and eccentric 'sky wizardry' types than regular Christian iconography. There is a fair smattering of portraits (including one of Fr. Kircher I don't think I'd seen before) as well as architectural and landscape prints around. (probably via Archivalia)




From Jan Swammerdam's famed 1752 insect book, 'Bibel der Natur', one of the Object of the Month series at Humboldt University (I think these are drawn from the wonderful Natural History Collection)








'The Punishments of China' (1801/1804) by GH Mason at NYPL "looks like a cheerful children's book, but it provides graphic detail of ingenious cruelties devised to penalize thieves, disorderly women and translators who willfully misinterpreted others' words. The punishment for "committing fraud on merchants" was to be suspended face down on a canvas sling that could be tightened to back-breaking extremes." (for example)
Coincidentally, a copy of this book is presently on display in an exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles: 'China on Paper: European and Chinese Works From the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century'.
















This 1514 book from Munich State Library is very resistant to all my searching efforts despite my having saved some identifying details. It is a religious book of some sort. By that I mean that it may be something about the history of acceptance of Mary into Christianity as a Saintly figure, but there was also a relationship to Judaism if I recall correctly. My notes say: "[Impressum]
Enderung vn[d] schmach der bildung Marie von de[n] jude[n] bewissen. vn[d] zu ewiger gedechtnüsz durch Maximilianu[m] den römische[n] keyser zu male[n] verschaffet in der löbliche[n] stat kolmer. vo[n] da[n]nen sy ouch ewig vertriben syndt, [Straßburg] urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00011433-7 [1511]" I of course just kept the torture scenes which were very much in the minority - most of the woodcuts in the book were in fact rather more benign than these.




The trippy healing mandalas drawn on graph paper by Emma Kunz (1892-1963) were obviously influenced by her Swiss family of weavers and call to my mind theosophy and spirographs equally. [via Tomorrowland]


Other things....

• The David Rumsey site added more than 1500 new maps to their collection at the end of November (scroll down a little).
• A collection of links relating to 15th/16th century Book of Hours by French printer Simon Vostre, put together by The Little Professor.
• I don't pretend to understand the Digital Sample Book from the Rochester Institute of Technology other than to say that you can see, compare and manipulate a huge range of highly magnified samples of printing techniques from woodcut to laser printer and everything in between.
• My New Year's resolution was to make these multi posts smaller thereby extending the half life of my sanity.

For the benefit of the rss readers, here are all the digital library and resource sites from the sidebar (a few new ones added in the last couple of months)...

∇ library of congress
∇ british library
∇ library france
∇ library holland
∇ library spain
∇ library portugal
∇ european library
∇ library australia
∇ collections canada
∇ digital poland
∇ nypl digital
∇ botanicus digital
∇ rare book room
∇ britmuseum prints
∇ smithsonian galaxy
∇ casglu'r tlysau
∇ rumsey collection
∇ digital scriptorium
∇ cesg manuscripts
∇ digital book index
∇ primary sources
∇ online exhibitions
∇ worldcat search
∇ library directory
∇ digital librarian
∇ intute resources
∇ herder institute
∇ warburg institute
∇ lexilogos links
∇ digiwiki links
∇ archivalia blog
∇ book arts web
∇ arts journal
∇ artcyclopedia
∇ woodblock
∇ coconino
∇ alchemy website
∇ health history links
∇ history network
∇ new advent