The Writing on the Wall

[textualthings]

Author's Writing on the Wall

When writing last week of leaving messages behind in old homes, we stumbled upon an interesting story of an unknown Chinese author. The writer covered every wall in an abandoned cottage in Chongqing, China with the words of their novel:

[ledecorquejadore]

Berlin, Jewish Museum (by oriana.italy)

[visual-poetry]

»city of words« by vito acconci

[erikkwakkel]

700-year-old English speech bubbles

If you thought comics were a modern invention, think again! The top image of c. 1300 shows a drawing that has the ingredients of a modern comic book drawing, including the fact that the text is placed in real speech bubbles: the words (which are in English!) are connected to the speaker’s mouth by means of a tiny line. It turns out this tradition was alive and kicking in medieval times. Read more about these 700-year-old speech bubbles - including what the funny English text says - in this longer blog I posted.

Pics: London, British Library, Stowe MS 49 (c. 1300); Los Angeles, Getty Museum, MS 66 (13th century); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 11978 (15th century).

[textualthings]

The walls of medieval and early modern taverns were often covered in graffiti. From time to time they were whitewashed and the writing on the wall could start all over again. In this brothel scene (1550, Berlin: Gemäldegalerie) - somewhat euphemistically entitled ‘Merry Company’ - by the Antwerp painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen text graffiti is mixed with what seem to be alchemical symbols.

[textualthings]

London billboards are sharing the stories of people moving both to and from the rapidly changing city. Some of them are quite painful to read.

From: Citylab

[thejapanesewoodblock]

Tosa Mitsuoki Japanese, 1617-1691

Autumn Maples with Poem Slips, c. 1675

Six-panel screen (one of pair); Ink, colors, gold leaf, and gold powder on silk

[textualthings]

Japanese aristocrats engaged in the elegant custom of recollecting classical poetry while viewing spring and autumn foliage. In these delicate screens, premier court painter Tosa Mitsuoki meditated on the inevitable passage of beauty by depicting the melancholy hours after the departure of reveling courtiers. A cherry tree bursts into bloom on the right screen (seen here at top), while its mate displays the brilliant red and gold foliage of maples in autumn. Slips of poetry, called tanzaku, waft from the blossoming limbs, the remaining evidence of a human presence. Courtiers (whose names are recorded in a seventeenth-century document) assisted Mitsuoki by inscribing the narrow strips with quotations of appropriate seasonal poetry from twelfth- and thirteenth-century anthologies. The screens were either commissioned by or given to Tofukumon’in (1607–1678), a daughter of the Tokugawa shogun who married the emperor Gomizunoo (1596–1680). In an era otherwise marked by increasing control of the feudal shogunate over imperial prerogatives, this royal couple encouraged a renaissance of courtly taste that nostalgically evoked the past glories of early-medieval aristocratic life.

From the website of the Art Institute Chicago

[textualthings]

Table Talk

“[S]uch biblical metaphor would have hovered over and mingled with this physical environment, infusing it with a sense of holy imminence and charging the atmosphere with the force of holy injunction”.

In this fascinating talk, Andrew Morrall presents and analyses numerous inscriptions that filled homes in early modern Northern Europe.

[lewilliamnorth]

Rimbaud on the wall in Paris - Le Bateau Ivre for anybody to explore along the street

[theglobalbook-blog]

Gospel passages inscribed on the wall of a medieval crypt at Old Dongola. 

More info here.

[textualthings]

Paper or Porphyry?

The importance of a medium can perhaps best be measured by its impact on other media. Film gained enormous artistic credibility when novelists started to use cinematographic narrative techniques. Likewise, the best sign of the success of Twitter is the fact that newspapers and magazines now print tweets in their paper editions.

Above are two images from the 1593 edition of De poeticsche werken (‘The Poetical Works’) of Jan van der Noot (ca. 1540-ca. 1595), an important Dutch Renaissance author from the Southern Low Countries. This large (32 by 21 cm.), luxurious and expensive object is a celebration of what late sixteenth-century book printing in the Low Countries was capable of. Yet another textual medium, that of the inscription, is omnipresent. The top image shows the title page of De poeticsche werken. It depicts a Roman monument with the title of Van der Noot’s book, the name of the author, the place and date of printing and name of the printer. These are centrally engraved into the stone in so-called Roman, a type based on the letters used by the ancient Romans for their monumental inscriptions.

This sort of architectural construction with inscriptions on the title page was not uncommon in early modern printed books. But Jan van der Noot and Daniël Vervliet, the printer of De poeticsche werken, went a significant step further. The suggestion of inscription is not only present on the title page but throughout the book. Every one of the 61 pages of text is decorated with a frame, as if it were an engraved slab of stone on a wall.

The second image contains an additional reference to the medium of the inscription. On the bottom of the page an epigram has been printed. The epigram dates back to Greek and Roman antiquity and was the genre par excellence for literary inscriptions on walls and monuments.

The relationship of a Renaissance poet like Jan van der Noot to monuments and monumental writing is less straightforward then the above examples from De poeticsche werken might seem to suggest. Monuments, and the writings that adorned them, were erected to be durable and perpetuate the memory of who- or whatever they celebrated. However, in literature, they could also become a symbol of the very opposite, namely transience and oblivion. In a sonnet addressed ‘to his muse’ Van der Noot gave a charming variation on Horace’s famous ode Exegi monumentum aere perennius (‘I have built a monument more lasting than bronze’) (Ode 3.30.1). The text opens an earlier collection of his poetry, entitled Het Bosken (London: Henry Binneman & John Daye, [1570]).

            Veel herder dan in stael, in coper of pourphier,

            Heb ick dit werck volbrocht so dat de loop der Iaeren,

            Den reghen noch den wint, noch ooc Mulsibersscharen,

            Dat selfde nymmermeer en sullen schenden fier:

            Als mynen lesten dach my sal doen slapen schier,

            Dan en sal Vander Noot niet al gaen inde baren:

            Want synen boeck sal dan synen naem bet verclaren

            Dan Marmer of Pourphier, al en ist maer pampier

                         (‘Tot sijn muse’, v. 1-8)

 [Far harder then if it were from steel, from copper or from porphyry / I have made this work, so that neither the course of time, / Nor rain or wind, or the gods of fire, / Can ever haughtily damage it; / When my final day will put me to eternal rest, / Then not all of Vander Noot will be carried on the bier: / For his book will glorify his name more / Then Marble or Porphyry could ever do, even if it is only made of paper] 

Like the Horatian text, Van der Noot’s sonnet is about literary fame and posterity. However, contrary to his classical example, it is also – even primarily - about the materiality of writing. Horace opposes the work of the sculptor to that of the poet. According to his ode literary works will last longer than bronze monuments because they are not dependent on a particular kind of (transient) matter. Horace thus presents text as something essentially immaterial.

Van der Noot’s sonnet, however, is all about text and matter. He opposes two material manifestations of text, that of the inscription and that of the book. He does not so much suggest that his poems will last because they are immaterial but because of their specific kind of materiality, that of the book. Sure, the book is only made of paper and paper is far less durable then steel, copper or porphyry. But the book will still outlive these materials used for inscriptions. The reason for this, of course, is that books like Van der Noot’s are printed on multiple copies, while inscriptions are generally unique. Van der Noot’s ‘to his muse’, then, can be read as an adaptation of Horace’s Ode Exegi monumentum for the early age of print.

Nevertheless, inscriptions did have a strong attraction for Van der Noot, because of their monumentality, no doubt, their visual attractiveness or their association with antiquity. Hence his urge, two decades later in De poeticsche vverken, to make something that is both the matter of monuments and of books: steel, copper, porphyry ánd paper.

[bonjourxxjls]

[textualthings]

Source

[gandalf1202-deactivated20190320]

Albrecht Dürer - Die Ehrenpforte Kaiser Maximilians I [1559] on Flickr.

Intended as a non-sedentary, universal epitaph, this, the largest woodcut of its time is 3.5 metres high and intended not as a book but as a wall decoration. The 195 printing plates were printed on 36 Großfolio sheets. Since disagreements existed over the family tree, and a blank field inserted for the result of the Turkish war by Maximilian, the triumphal was not completed until 1518. Further additions took place in 1526. The Albertina copy comes from the year 1559, the third issue under Archduke Charles, the colouring is likely to have been added. [Albertina, Vienna - Woodcut]

[textualthings]

Best (wall) wishes for 2015

A few years ago, when visiting an Oxford college, I was struck by the entrance door to the college chapel, which was filled with little scraps of paper pinned to the door. They contained intercessions for prayers. At the time I had just started a research project on the posting of poems and prayers in churches in the fifteenth- and sixteenth- century Low Countries. I was delighted by the parallel with the historical practice that I was studying. It gave me the idea for this blog and the subject of its first post (see below).

I have since discovered that the practice of posting all sorts of written wishes and injunctions on walls, doors and other architectural constructions is actually far more common than I imagined. It is even a highly international and intercultural phenomenon. Above are four examples from as many continents. On top is the facade of the supposed Verona home of Juliet, with short letters addressed to the heroin from Shakespeare’s famous play; underneath is a Japanese Shinto shrine hung with ema, or votive tablets with wishes and prayers; next to it is The Wishing Wall, an installation in Cape Town by two South African artists.

The last image is the New Year’s Eve Wishing Wall on Times Square in New York. Visitors can write down wishes on brightly colored papers and pin them to the wall. The papers/wishes are then released as confetti over Times Square at the stroke of midnight. The material text is everywhere. Happy 2015!

[textualthings]

Van Aelst in Istanbul

We always see the familiar in the unfamiliar. In 1533 the Flemish painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502-1550) travelled from Antwerp to Constantinople and stayed there for an entire year, possibly in an attempt to sell Brussels tapestries to the sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Coecke lay down his impressions of his journey in drawings that were published after his death by his widow Mayke Verhulst in the form of a series of woodcuts entitled ‘Moeurs et Fachons des Turcz’.

It is not hard to imagine how foreign and strange the Ottoman world must have been for Coecke. Yet there is something remarkably familiar in the scenes he drew. Perhaps this is because they depict phenomena that - in a different form of course - also existed in the artist’s Low Countries. For example, most of the woodcuts evoke some sort of parade or procession. As a versatile Renaissance artist Coecke must have had a keen interest in pageantry. Sixteen years later, in 1549, he would be actively involved in setting up the decorations of the joyous entry into Antwerp of Charles V and Philip II.

 In the bottom left of the above fragment Coecke drew a gravestone with an inscription. Although it is highly unlikely that he mastered Ottoman Turkish he still tried to suggest it on the stone. This interest in foreign scripts is surely due to the artist’s humanistic cultural background. Thus, another woodcut contains an obelisk with hieroglyphs. Yet, the gravestone with the inscription might also be there because of its familiar unfamiliarity. Like the parade and procession, inscriptions on graves were something that was shared by Netherlandish and Ottoman culture and thus functioned as a cultural mediator, a point of entry of one culture into the other.

[textualthings]

Bologna: Palazzo Bocchi (1546)

Not quite the most modest way to show what a learned person you are. Kindly pointed out to me by Simone Testa of the Italian Academies Project: the facade of the palazzo beloning to the Italian humanist Achille Bocchi (1488-1562) and the seat of his Bolognese Accademia Hermatena. Two inscriptions run along the rusticated base of the front: one is the only example of inscription in Hebrew on a monument building existing in Italy and Europe and reproduces a verse from psalm 120 of the Psalter in Jewish characters and reads: "Deliver me from the liars, God! They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth." The other one is in Latin and is taken from the Epistle 1 by Horace and reads:"Rex eris, aiunt, si recte facies" ("do well, thou shalt be crowned").

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