Behold the Astronomicum Caesareum, “Perhaps the Most Beautiful Scientific Book Ever Printed” (1540)

in Art, Books, Science | May 27th, 2021

Art, science, and magic seem to have been rarely far apart during the Renaissance, as evidenced by the elaborate 1540 Astronomicum Caesareum — or “Emperor’s Astronomy” — seen here. “The most sumptuous of all Renaissance instructive manuals, ” the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes, the book was created over a period of 8 years by Petrus Apianus, also known as Apian, an astronomy professor at the University of Ingolstadt. Modern-day astronomer Owen Gingerich, professor emeritus at Harvard University, calls it “the most spectacular contribution of the book-maker’s art to sixteenth-century science.”

Apian’s book was mainly designed for what is now considered pseudoscience. “The main contemporary use of the book would have been to cast horoscopes,” Robert Batteridge writes at the National Library of Scotland. Apian used as examples the birthdays of his patrons: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his brother Ferdinand I. But the Astronomicum Caesareum did more than calculate the future.

Despite the fact that the geocentric model on which Apian based his system “would begin to be overtaken just 3 years after the book’s publication,” he accurately described five comets, including what would come to be called Halley’s Comet.

Apian also “observed that a comet’s tail always points away from the sun,” Fine Books and Collections writes, “a discovery for which he is credited.” He used his book “to calculate eclipses,” notes Gingerich in an introduction, including a partial lunar eclipse in the year of Charles’ birth. And, “in a pioneering use of astronomical chronology, he takes up the circumstances of several historical eclipses.” These discussions are accompanied by “several movable devices” called volvelles, designed “for an assortment of chronological and astrological inquiries.”

Medieval volvelles were first introduced by artist and writer Ramón Llull in 1274. A “cousin of the astrolabe,” Getty writes, the devices consist of “layered circles of parchment… held together at the center by a tie.” They were considered “a form of ‘artificial memory,’” called by Lund University’s Lars Gislén “a kind of paper computer.” Apian was a specialist of the form, publishing several books containing volvelles from his own Ingolstadt printing press. The Astronomicum Caesareum became the pinnacle of such scientific art, using its hand-colored paper devices to simulate the movements of the astrolabe. “The great volume grew and changed in the course of the printing,” Gingerich writes, “eventually comprising fifty-five leaves, of which twenty-one contain moving parts.”

Apian was rewarded handsomely for his work. “Emperor Charles V granted the professor a new coat of arms,” and “the right to appoint poets laureate and to pronounce as legitimate children born out of wedlock.” He was also appointed court mathematician, and copies of his extraordinary book lived on in the collections of European aristocrats for centuries, “a triumph of the printer’s art,” writes Gingerich, and an astronomy, and astrology, “fit for an emperor.”

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Different Ways, Revealing Six Different Books in One

160,000+ Medieval Manuscripts Online: Where to Find Them

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Makes the Art of Bonsai So Expensive?: $1 Million for a Bonsai Tree, and $32,000 for Bonsai Scissors

in Art | May 27th, 2021

During the past year’s stretches of time at home, quite a few of us have attempted to introduce more plant life into our surroundings. By some accounts, indoor gardening ranks among the most cost-effective ways of increasing the quality of one’s domestic life. But those of us who get too deep into it (aggressive pursuit of interests being a known characteristic of Open Culture readers) may find themselves getting more than they bargained for, or at any rate paying more than they intended to, especially if they go down the road of bonsai. Though it has its origins in the Chinese practice of penzai, one must look to Japan to find the practitioners who have made the greatest investments in the art of growing proportionally impeccable dwarf trees — investments of time and money both.

Buying a mature work of bonsai can cost up to nearly one million U.S. dollars, according to the episode above of Business Insider’s “So Expensive” series. That was the price of one tree at the 2012 International Bonsai Convention, but others have received valuations nearly as impressive. This reflects the enormous amount of labor a proper bonsai demands: not just daily watering, but “years of pruning, wiring, repotting and grafting,” as the narrator puts it.

“Many of these techniques require years to master, and any errors made can result in permanently ruining the shape, or even killing a plant that has been growing for centuries.” The work of bonsai is the work of generations, a fact embodied by Chieko Yamamoto, the fourth-generation bonsai master shown explaining the pursuit in which she’s spent more than half a century.

Even Yamamoto’s relatively simple-looking bonsai have taken fifteen, perhaps 25 years to take their shape. When executing a new idea, she must wait about five years just to see how it turns out, and the outcome isn’t always to her satisfaction. “There are no immediate answers,” she says, “so I need to live a long life to see the results.” Bonsai has on its side the famous longevity of the Japanese population, as well as the equally famous dedication of Japanese civilization to cultivating master craftsmanship. But even so, the now-diminishing number of bonsai businesses aggravates an already severe limitation of supply versus demand, and the trade itself has certain formidable barriers to entry. “The bonsai parts and the tools are often handmade,” says the Business Insider video’s narrator, “and can cost thousands of dollars themselves.”

In the case of Sasuke scissors, profiled in the Great Big Story documentary short just above, they can cost tens of thousands of dollars. In his shop of that name outside Osaka, blacksmith Yasuhiro Hiraka — a fifth-generation scissormaker, and the last of his kind in Japan — works for a week or longer, ten hours a day, just to make one pair. A standard model runs about $1,100 and a deluxe one costs more than $32,000, but a full-fledged bonsai master cannot settle for less. “I never thought I would be able to have them,” says one such adept, Masakazu Yoshikawa, of his first Sasuke scissors. “It was very emotional.” But the mere act of taking them in hand, he adds, “makes me want to make good bonsai.” For Hiraka’s part, he says, after 50 years of scissor-making, “I finally think I am starting to reach my peak.” As we Westerners say, you can’t rush quality.

Related Content:

The Art & Philosophy of Bonsai

This 392-Year-Old Bonsai Tree Survived the Hiroshima Atomic Blast & Still Flourishes Today: The Power of Resilience

A Digital Animation Compares the Size of Trees: From the 3‑Inch Bonsai, to the 300-Foot Sequoia

Daisugi, the 600-Year-Old Japanese Technique of Growing Trees Out of Other Trees, Creating Perfectly Straight Lumber

See How Traditional Japanese Carpenters Can Build a Whole Building Using No Nails or Screws

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Incredible Engineering of Antonio Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia, the 137 Year Construction Project

in Architecture, Art | May 24th, 2021

When (or if) it is finally finished in 2026, a full 100 years after its architect Antoni Gaudí’s death, the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia will be the largest church in the world — making it, on the one hand, a distinctly 19th century phenomenon much like other structures designed in the late 1800s. The Brooklyn Bridge, for instance, became the longest suspension bridge in the world in 1883, the same year Gaudí took over the Sagrada Familia project; the Eiffel Tower took the honor of tallest structure in the world when it opened six years later. Biggest was in the briefs for major industrial building projects of the age.

Most other monumental construction projects of the time, however, excelled in one category Gaudí rejected: speed. While the Brooklyn Bridge took 14 years to build, cost many lives, including its chief architect’s, and suffered several setbacks, its construction was still quite a contrast to the medieval architecture from which its designs drew. Prague’s 14th century Charles Bridge took 45 years to finish. Half a century was standard for gothic cathedrals in the Middle Ages. (Notre-Dame was under construction for hundreds of years.) Their original architects hardly ever lived to see their projects to completion.

Gaudí’s enormous modernist cathedral was as much a personal labor of love as a gift to Barcelona, but unlike his contemporaries, he had no personal need to see it done. He was “unfazed by its glacial progress,” notes Atlas Obscura. The architect himself said, “There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the church. I will grow old but others will come after me. What must always be conserved is the spirit of the work, but its life has to depend on the generations it is handed down to and with whom it lives and is incarnated.”

Perhaps even Gaudí could not have foreseen Sagrada Familia would take over 130 years, its cranes and scaffolding dominating the city’s skyline, decade after decade. A few things — the Spanish Civil War, inevitable funding issues — got in the way. But it’s also the case that Sagrada Familia is unlike anything else ever built. Gaudí “found much of his inspiration and meaning in architecture,” the Real Engineering video above notes, “by following the patterns of nature, using the beauty that he saw as a gift from God as the ultimate blueprint to the world.”

Learn above what sets Sagrada Familia apart — its creator was not only a master architect and artist, he was also a master engineer who understood how the strange, organic shapes of his designs “impacted the structural integrity of the building. Rather than fight against the laws of nature, he worked with them.” And nature, we know, likes to take its time.

Watch Antoni Gaudí’s Unfinished Masterpiece, the Sagrada Família, Get Finally Completed in 60 Seconds

A Virtual Time-Lapse Recreation of the Building of Notre Dame (1160)

An Animated Video Shows the Building of a Medieval Bridge: 45 Years of Construction in 3 Minutes

How the Brooklyn Bridge Was Built: The Story of One of the Greatest Engineering Feats in History

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai: An Introduction to the Iconic Japanese Woodblock Print in 17 Minutes

in Art | May 20th, 2021

When woodcut artist Katsushika Hokusai made his famous print The Great Wave off Kanagawa in 1830 — part of the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — he was 70 years old and had lived his entire life in a Japan closed off from the rest of the world. In the 19th century, however, “the rest of the world was becoming industrialized,” James Payne explains above in his Great Art Explained video, “and the Japanese were concerned about foreign invasions.” The Great Wave shows “an image of Japan fearful that the sea — which has protected its peaceful isolation for so long — would become its downfall.”

It’s also true, however, that The Great Wave would not have existed without a foreign invasion. Prussian blue, the first stable blue pigment, accidentally invented around 1705 in Berlin, arrived in the ports of Nagasaki on Dutch and Chinese ships in the 1820s. Prussian Blue would start a new artistic movement in Japan, aizuri‑e, woodcuts printed in bright, vivid blues.

“Hokusai was one of the first Japanese printmakers to boldly embrace the colour,” Hugh Davies writes at The Conversation, “a decision that would have major implications in the world of art.” When the country’s isolationist policies ended in the 1850s, “a showcase at the inaugural Japanese Pavilion elevated the artistic status of woodblock prints and a craze for their collection quickly followed.”

Chief among the works collected in the European and American fervor for Japanese prints were those from Hokusai, his contemporary Hiroshige, and other aizuri‑e artists. So famous was The Great Wave in the West by 1891 that French graphic artist Pierre Bonnard would satirize its stylish spray in an advertisement for champagne. A print of The Great Wave hung on Claude Debussy’s wall, and the first edition of his La Mer bore an adaptation of a detail from the print. As Michael Cirigliano writes for the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Cultural circles throughout Europe greatly admired Hokusai’s work…. Major artists of the Impressionist movement such as Monet owned copies of Hokusai prints, and leading art critic Philippe Burty, in his 1866 Chefs-d’oeuvre des Arts industriels, even stated that Hokusai’s work maintained the elegance of Watteau, the fantasy of Goya, and the movement of Delacroix. Going one step further in his lauded comparisons, Burty wrote that Hokusai’s dexterity in brush strokes was comparable only to that of Rubens.

These comparisons are not misplaced, John-Paul Stonard explains in The Guardian: “That the Great Wave became the best known print in the west was in large part due to Hokusai’s formative experience of European art.” Not only did he absorb Prussian blue into his repertoire, but “prints from early in his career show him attempting, rather awkwardly, to apply the lesson of mathematical perspective, learnt from European prints brought into Japan by Dutch Traders.” By the time of The Great Wave, he had perfected his own synthesis of Western and Japanese art, over two decades before European painters would attempt the same in the explosion of Japanophilia of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Watch the Making of Japanese Woodblock Prints, from Start to Finish, by a Longtime Tokyo Printmaker

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanazawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

Download Vincent van Gogh’s Collection of 500 Japanese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Create “the Art of the Future”

Watch the Making of Japanese Woodblock Prints, from Start to Finish, by a Longtime Tokyo Printmaker

19th-Century Japanese Woodblocks Illustrate the Lives of Western Inventors, Artists, and Scholars (1873)

The Met Puts 650+ Japanese Illustrated Books Online: Marvel at Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji and More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch a Masterpiece Emerge from a Solid Block of Stone

in Art | May 14th, 2021

As a younger person, I became enthralled with the art-historical novels of Irving Stone, especially The Agony and the Ecstasy, his fictionalized biography of Michelangelo. Few books live up to their title so well — Stone’s Michelangelo is a tumult of passion and pain, a Romantic hero tailor-made for those who believe artistic creation transcends almost any other act. Stone describes Michelangelo’s sculpture emerging from the marble fully-formed in a creation imbued with so much sexual energy, some passages may need adult supervision:

It was like penetrating deep into white marble with the pounding live thrust of his chisel beating upward through the warm living marble with one ”Go!”, his whole body behind the heavy hammer, penetrating through ever deeper and deeper furrows of soft yielding living substance until he had reached the explosive climax, and all of his fluid strength, love, passion, desire had been poured into the nascent form, and the marble block, made to love the hand of the true sculptor, and responded, giving of its inner heat and substance and fluid form, until at last the sculptor and the marble had totally coalesced, so deeply penetrating and infusing each other that they had become one, marble and man and organic unity, each fulfilling the other in the greatest act of art and love known to the human species.

Whether or not you’re moved by Stone’s prose, you have to admit, it does make sculpting sound enormously appealing. For a much less masculine take on what it’s like to carve a figure from a solid block of stone, see the National Geographic short film above, in which a three-dimensional portrait comes alive in the hands of stone carver Anna Rubincam.

This is a labor of love, but it is also one of careful preparation. Rubincam “begins her process by measuring and sketching the features of a live model,” the film’s YouTube page notes. “From there, she creates a clay version before moving on to carefully chisel the piece out of stone.” The entire process took three weeks.

Is there room for agony and ecstasy amidst the measurements? Indeed. “I always feel that you have to be a bit mad to become a stone carver,” says Rubincam, acknowledging that “this isn’t the Renaissance anymore. Stone isn’t a primary building material anymore. Why would anyone go into a profession” like this one? Rubincam’s answer — “there just wasn’t any other option” — cannot help but bring to mind the most popular quote from Stone’s novel: “One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.”

Alexander Calder’s Archive Goes Online: Explore 1400 Works of Art by the Modernist Sculptor

3D Print 18,000 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks Get Digitized: Where to Read the Renaissance Man’s Manuscripts Online

in Archives, Art, History, Science | May 13th, 2021

From the hand of Leonardo da Vinci came the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, among other art objects of intense reverence and even worship. But to understand the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, one must immerse oneself in his notebooks. Totaling some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, they record something of every aspect of the Renaissance man’s intellectual and daily life: studies for artworks, designs for elegant buildings and fantastical machines, observations of the world around him, lists of his groceries and his debtors. Intending their eventual publication, Leonardo left his notebooks to his pupil Francesco Melzi, by the time of whose own death half a century later little had been done with them.

Absent a proper steward, Leonardo’s notebooks scattered across the world. Six centuries later, their surviving pages constitute a series of codices in the possession of such entities as the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the British Museum, the Institut de France, and Bill Gates.

In recent years, they and their collaborating organizations have made efforts to open Leonardo’s notebooks to the world, digitizing them, translating them, and organizing them for convenient browsing on the web. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the Codex Arundel as made available to the public by the British Library, Codex Atlanticus by the Visual Agency, and the three-part Codex Forster by the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Other collections of Leonardo’s notebooks made available to view online include the Madrid Codices at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Codex Trivulzianus at the Archivo Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana, and the Codex on the Flight of Birds at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. (Published as a standalone book, his Treatise on Painting is available to download at Project Gutenberg.) Even so, many of the pages Leonardo wrote haven’t yet made it to the internet, and even when they do, generations of interpretive work — well beyond reversing his “mirror writing” — will surely remain. Much as humanity is only now putting some of his inventions to the test, the full publication of his notebooks remains a work in progress. Leonardo himself would surely understand: after all, one can’t cultivate a mind like his without patience.

Download the Sublime Anatomy Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Available Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonardo da Vinci’s Bizarre Caricatures & Monster Drawings

Leonardo da Vinci’s Handwritten Resume (1482)

Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (Circa 1490) Is Much Cooler Than Yours

Why Did Leonardo da Vinci Write Backwards? A Look Into the Ultimate Renaissance Man’s “Mirror Writing”

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

David Hockney Shows Us His Sketch Book, Page by Page

in Art | May 10th, 2021

Still working and exhibiting in his eighties, and indeed seeming to grow more and more productive with age, David Hockney has become a living symbol of what it is to live as an artist. This entails not just making a lot of paintings, or even making a lot of paintings with an immediately recognizable style under a well-cultivated image. It means constantly and instinctively converting the reality in which one lives into art, an activity evidenced by Hockney’s sketchbooks. In the video above, the artist himself shows his sketchbook from 2019, one of the sources of the work in the exhibition Drawing from Life held last year at the National Portrait Gallery. (To accompany the exhibition, Hockney published a book, also called Drawing from Life, which features 150 drawings from the 1950s to the present day.)

Focused on Hockney’s renderings of himself and those close to him, Drawing from Life could run for only a few weeks before the NPG had to close due to the coronavirus pandemic. Though filled up the previous year, the artist’s sketchbook depicts a quiet world of domestic spaces and unpeopled outdoor scenes that will look oddly familiar to many viewing it after 2020.

He even appears to have included in its pages an exercise in the style of Giorgio de Chirico, whose aesthetic prescience about our locked-down cities we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. The Bradford-born Hockney’s American city of choice has long been Los Angeles, and certain of his sketches evoke its distinctive pockets of near-pastoral quietude amid urban massiveness.

As befits an internationally renowned artist, Hockney lives in more than one part of the world. It was at home in the more thoroughly pastoral setting of his native Yorkshire that he created the drawings constituting My Window, a limited-edition artist book published by Taschen in 2019. Those images don’t come from his sketchbook, or rather, they don’t come from his analog sketchbook: he executed them all on his iPhone and iPad, devices whose artistic possibilities he’s been enthusiastically exploring for more than a decade. In this readiness to use any medium available, he shows more comfort with technology than do many younger artists. And however many of them have, under the limitations of the past year and a half, got used to sketching the view from their bedroom window, Hockney was doing it long before.

Watch as David Hockney Creates ‘Late November Tunnel, 2006

The Sketchbook Project Presents Online 24,000 Sketchbooks, Created by Artists from 135 Countries

29 Sketchbooks by Renowned Artist Richard Diebenkorn, Containing 1,045 Drawings, Now Freely Viewable Online

When Our World Became a de Chirico Painting: How the Avant-Garde Painter Foresaw the Empty City Streets of 2020

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Beautiful 19th-Century Indian Drawings Show Hatha Yoga Poses Before They Reached the West

in Art, Books, Health, Religion | May 6th, 2021

Yoga as an athletic series of postures for physical health came into being only about 100 years ago, part of a wave of gymnastics and calisthenics that spread around the Western world in the 1920s and made its way to India, combining with classical Indian spirituality and asanas, a word which translates to “seat.” Yoga, of course, had existed as a classical spiritual discipline in India for thousands of years. (The word is first found in the Rig Veda), but it had little to do with fitness, as yoga scholar Mark Singleton found when he delved into the roots of yoga as we know it.

Asana practice was often marginal, even scorned by some 19th century Indian teachers of high caste as the domain of “fakirs” and mendicant beggars. “The first wave of ‘export yogis,’” writes Singleton, “headed by Swami Vivekananda, largely ignored asana and tended to focus instead on pranayama [breath practice], meditation, and positive thinking…. Vivekananda publicly rejected hatha yoga in general and asana in particular.”

In the 20th century, yoga became associated with Indian nationalism and anti-colonial resistance, and imported Western poses were combined with asanas for a program of intense physical training.

Westernized yoga has obscured other traditions around the world that developed over hundreds or thousands of years. For his book with James Mallinson, Roots of Yoga, Singleton consulted “yogic texts from Tibetan, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Tamil, Pali, Kashmiri, Old Marathi, Avadhi, Braj Bhasha, and English,” notes the Public Domain Review, who bring our attention to this early 19th-century series of images from a text called the Joga Pradīpikā, made before classical yoga became known in the west by adventurous thinkers like Henry David Thoreau.

A few millennia before it was the provenance of lycra-clad teachers in boutique studios, asana practice combined rigorous, often quite painful-looking, meditative postures with mudras (“seals”), hand gestures whose origins “remain obscure,” though yoga historian Georg Feuerstein argues “they are undoubtedly the products of intensive meditation practice during [which] the body spontaneously assumes certain static as well as dynamic poses.” The collection of drawings in the 118-page book depicts 84 asanas and 24 mudras, “with explanatory notes in Braja-Bhasha verse,” notes the British Library, and one image (top) related to Kundalini yoga.

Whatever the various practices of yogic schools in both the Eastern and Western world, “the methods and lifestyles developed by the Indian philosophical and spiritual geniuses over a period of at least five millennia all have one and the same purpose,” writes Feuerstein in his seminal study, The Yoga Tradition: “to help us break through the habit patterns of our ordinary consciousness and to realize our identity (or at least union) with the perennial Reality. India’s great traditions of psychospiritual growth understand themselves as paths of liberation. Their goal is to liberate us from our conventional conditioning and hence also free us from suffering.”

Under a broad umbrella, yoga has flourished as an incredible wealth of traditions, philosophies, religious practices, and scholarship whose strands weave loosely together in what most of us know as yoga in a synthesis of East and West. Learn more at the Public Domain Review, and have a look at their new book of historic images, Affinities, here, a curated journey through visual culture.