Author Archives: Julie Mellby

Dutch Partridge Dog

Anonymous artist after Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), Frederick de Vries with Goltzius’ Dog, 1773, original 1597. Engraving. Bartsch 59.190; Hollstein 218; New Hollstein 256; Strauss 344. Bottom center “Theodorico Frisio Pictor egrogio / aput Venetos amicitiæ et filij absentis / repræsentandi gratia D.D.” Graphic Arts Collection Dutch/Netherlandish prints

 

The Graphic Arts Collection holds a reprint of one of Hendrick Goltzius’s most famous engravings, depicting Frederick de Vries, the son of the Venetian painter Theodore Frisius (to whom the print is dedicated), climbing onto Goltzius’s dog holding what has been called either a dove or a falcon. The dog has been identified as a Drentsche Patrijshond, a spaniel-type hunting dog from the Dutch province of Drenthe. In English, we say Dutch Partridge Dog (or “Drent” for Drenthe).

The Princeton University Art Museum holds a copy of the original engraving, completed in 1597, while ours is clearly labeled bottom center: “Romae apud Carolum Losi A. 1773.” This is the signature of bookseller and publisher Carlo Losi (active 1757-after 1805) whose shop was located at “via Condotti, presso il Palazzo dei Cavalieri di Malta, Rome.” According to the British Museum Losi reprinted popular 16th and 17th century engravings, having “almost no interest in new plates of topography, portraits or contemporary artists.” There is a catalogue of his stock in 1775 in Metropolitan Museum of Art and his stock of 1788 in Vatican. See also Veronica Federici, ‘Carlo Losi editore ai Condotti’, in Giovanna Sapori (ed.), Il Mercato delle Stampe a Roma XVI-XIX secolo, Rome 2008, pp.95-115.

See the impression at the Princeton University Art Museum: https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/47454

This Dutch Partridge Dog appears often in Goltzius’s drawings and engravings. Here are two more:

Hendrick Goltzius, Goltzius’s Dog, ca. 1595-1600. Black, brown, red and yellow chalk, brush in brown and black ink. Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Hendrick Goltzius, Sleeping Dog; verso: Study of the Same Dog, Seen from the Back, c. 1596. Metalpoint and graphite. Fondation Custodia / Collection Frits Lugt

Cane


Cane [by] Jean Toomer; with a foreword by Waldo Frank. New York, Boni and Liveright [c1923]. Firestone Library » PS3539.O478 C3 1923

Cane [electronic resource] [by] Jean Toomer; with a foreword by Waldo Frank. New York : Boni and Liveright, [c1923]

Plays of Negro life; a source-book of native America drama. Selected and edited by Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory. Decorations and illus. by Aaron Douglas. New York, Harper, 1927.
ReCAP » PS627.N4 L635 1927

Song of the sun / by Jeam Toomer. Detroit : Broadside Press, 1967, c1950. Special Collections Broadside 261

Singers of daybreak; studies in Black American literature [by] Houston A. Baker, Jr. Washington, Howard University Press, 1974. Firestone Library PS153.N5B27

Jean Toomer’s “Cane” and Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” : a Black reaction to the literary conventions of the twenties / by Darrell W. McNeely. 1974.

The Living earth. [s. l.] : Danbury Press, [c1975-1976] ReCAP .b17153055x

The waiting years : essays on American Negro literature / Blyden Jackson. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1976. Firestone Library » PS153.N5J34

The dream of Arcady : place and time in Southern literature / Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1980. ReCAP » PS261 .M25

Singers of daybreak : studies in black American literature / Houston A. Baker, Jr. Washington, D.C. : Howard University Press, 1983. African American Studies Reading Room (AAS). B-7-B » PS153.N5 B27 1983

Cane : an authoritative text, backgrounds, criticism / Jean Toomer ; edited by Darwin T. Turner. New York : Norton, c1988. Firestone Library » PS3539.O478 C3 1988

The collected poems of Jean Toomer [electronic resource] / edited by Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer ; with an introduction and textual notes by Robert B. Jones. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, ©1988. www.jstor.org

Invisible darkness : Jean Toomer & Nella Larsen / Charles R. Larson. Iowa City : University Of Iowa Press, [1993] www.jstor.org

Cane / Jean Toomer. New York : Modern Library, 1994. Firestone Library » PS3539.O478 C3 1994

Classic fiction of the Harlem Renaissance / edited by William L. Andrews. New York : Oxford University Press, 1994. ReCAP » PS647.A35 C57 1994
Cane de Jean Toomer & la Renaissance de Harlem / Françoise Clary. Paris : Ellipses, c1997. ReCAP » PS3539.O478 C33 1997

Jean Toomer and the terrors of American history / Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Firestone Library » PS3539.O478 C337 1998

Cane / Jean Toomer ; illustrations by Martin Puryear; afterword by Leon F. Litwack. San Francisco, Calif. : Arion Press, 2000. Graphic Arts Collection 2019- in process

Vorstellung der Köpf Maschiene in Paris

Johann Martin Will (1727 -1806), Vorstellung der Kopf Maschiene in Paris. Vermöge welcher in einer viertelstund 25 Personen könen enthauptet werden [Representation of the Head Machine by which 25 persons can be beheaded every quarter of an hour] [Augsburg: Johann Martin Will], 1792. Etching with engraving, engraved text in German and French. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019-in process

This unsigned satire of the French guillotine has been attributed to Augsburg-based printer/publisher Johann Martin Will, imagining a machine that will kill 25 people every 15 minutes. Parts are numbered in a scientific manner. Several victims are depicted, before and after, with heads and bodies scattered throughout. On the right, a “certified priest” walks both men and women prisoners towards the apparatus while on the left the audience includes children.

To make sure the viewer understands the import of the scene, the second column of text decries the horrors of the guillotine and of the current popular delusions: “… Oh woe to the people who strives to win freedom in such a manner, who invents such machines, steaming with human blood…. All who make sane use of their reason must despair.”

Saint James and the Magician Hermogenes

The Magician Hermogenes.

 

Pieter Van Der Heyden (1530?-1576?) after a design by Pieter Bruegel (1525?-1569), Divus Jacobus diabolicis praestigiis ante magum sustitur =Saint James by devilish arts is placed before the magician, 1565. Engraving. Also known as Saint Jacques et le magicien Hermogène or Saint James and the Magician Hermogenes. See: New Hollstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 11-1 and Lebeer, 57. Graphic Arts Collection. Dutch/Netherlandish prints

The companion print is The Fall of the Magician Hermogenes, not held in our collection.

The story of St. James and Hermogenes is part of the The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, 1275; first edition published 1470; translated by William Caxton, first edition 1483. A small section repeated here:

Upon his return to Judea, [James] again began to preach the word of God. Then the Pharisees asked a magician named Hermogenes to send his disciple Philetus to confront James, and to convict him of the falsity of his doctrine before the Jews. But on the contrary, James reasoned with Philetus and performed many miracles before his eyes, and in the end converted him, which all the people saw: and Philetus, when he returned to his master, praised James’s doctrine, recounted his miracles, proclaimed that he would become his disciple, and urged Hermogenes to follow his example. Then the magician, angered at this, wrought his magical arts upon Philetus, and deprived him of the power to move; and he said: ‘Now we shall see whether thy James can deliver thee!’ But when Philetus sent his servant to make this known to James, the apostle sent him his kerchief, saying: ‘Let him take this kerchief, and say: “The Lord lifts up them that fall, and looses the captives.”‘

And no sooner had Philetus touched the kerchief than he was freed from his magical bonds, hurled insults at Hermogenes, and hastened to rejoin the apostle. Enraged, Hermogenes ordered the demon to bring James and Philetus to him loaded with chains, that he might take his revenge upon him, and deter his disciples from similarly insulting him. But when the demons flew through the air and came to James, they began to howl and cry out: ‘Apostle James, have pity on us, for behold we burn before our time!’ And James said to them: ‘To what end come ye here.?’ And the demons responded: ‘Hermogenes sent us to lay hold of thee and of Philetus; but all at once the angel of God bound us with fiery chains, and ceases not to torture us.’ ‘Let the angel of God release you,’ said James, ‘but only on condition that ye bind Hermogenes and bring him to me unharmed.’

And the demons went and seized Hermogenes, and bound his hands behind his back, and brought him thus bound to James, saying to him: ‘Thou hast sent us to be burned and grievously tormented!’ And the demons said to James: ‘Give us power over him, that we may avenge thine insults and our burnings!’ And James said to them: ‘Here is Philetus before you: why do you not lay hands on him?’ And they answered: ‘We cannot touch so much as an ant that is in thy chamber!’ And James said to Philetus: ‘Let us follow the example of Christ, Who taught that we should return good for evil. Hermogenes bound thee: ‘do thou free him!’

And when Hermogenes stood before him, freed of his chains and covered with confusion, James said to him: ‘Go freely wherever thou wilt, for our law does not allow that one be converted unwillingly!’ And Hermogenes replied: ‘I know the vengeful spirit of the demons! They will kill me unless thou give me something that belongs to thee, as a safeguard.’ Then James gave him his staff, and he went off, and brought his books of magic to the apostle to be burnt. But James, fearing lest the smoke of them do some harm to the unwary, commanded him to throw them into the sea. And when he had done this, he returned and threw himself at the apostle’s feet, saying: ‘Thou who dost set souls free, receive as a penitent him whom thou hast succored even when he envied and slandered thee!’ And thenceforth he became perfect in the fear of God.

Continue reading: http://projects.mcah.columbia.edu/courses/medmil/pages/non-mma-pages/text_links/gl_james.html

The Country of the Blind privately printed

H. G. Wells, The Country of the Blind (New York: Privately printed [by Mitchell Kennerley], Christmas 1915). Aquatone frontispiece after a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Graphic Arts Collection 2019- in process

This is the first separate edition of one of the stories from the collaboration between H. G. Wells and Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Door in the Wall. Although there is no statement of limitation, a folded typed account of the book and its production, signed with initials by Mitchell Kennerley, states that two hundred copies were printed on handmade paper, typeset by Bertha Goudy.

The Country of the Blind was first published in The Strand magazine, April 1904, pp 201-15, with illustrations by Claude A. Shepperson.

The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley [Recap Z473.K45 B78 1986] was reviewed by Leonard Shatzkin, “Zero Royalty” in New York Times December 7, 1986. Here is a section:

MITCHELL KENNERLEY was a pioneer among American publishers. Only two years after he joined John Lane as a junior clerk at the Bodley Head in London, Kennerley was taken by Lane to New York. In ”The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley, Bookman,” Matthew J. Bruccoli says Kennerley always insisted Lane had put him in charge of the firm’s American branch then; he was 18 years old. Three years later, irritated with Kennerley’s failure to handle essential business details, Lane arrived at the New York offices unannounced, discovered that Kennerley had also been taking company money and fired him.

…Kennerley made significant contributions to book publishing and book collecting. From the start, he strove for the highest physical and artistic quality. His first office was in a New York building in which Frederic W. Goudy, America’s most famous typographer and type designer, was struggling to get started, and Kennerley used his services extensively. One of Goudy’s best-known and most important typefaces, Kennerley Old Style, grew out of that association.

Kennerley’s books were beautifully typeset, printed on high-quality paper that was often handmade and tastefully bound. Some were set into type by Bertha Goudy, Frederic’s talented wife. Alfred A. Knopf, who in his time set the standards of quality for the modern generation of publishers, acknowledged that his youthful apprenticeship with Kennerley associated him ”with a man who had a very fine sense of typography and of sound conservative book-making.” Among the many distinguished authors whose first or early works were represented among the 400 titles Kennerley published are Van Wyck Brooks, Frank Harris, D. H. Lawrence, Vachel Lindsay, Walter Lippmann, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells and Oscar Wilde.

…In 1915, Kennerley became president of the Anderson Galleries. He continued to publish books for a time on a very much reduced scale, but auctions, particularly of rare books, became his main occupation. Later, as his financial fortunes drifted downward, he worked unsuccessfully in book retailing and even in printing. Kennerley ended in poverty, a lonely suicide in 1950 at the age of 71.

Madeline Gins, speculative fiction

Madeline Gins (1941-2014) was an American poet, writer and philosopher. She grew up in Island Park, NY, and graduated from Barnard College in 1962 where she studied physics and philosophy. While studying painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1962, Gins met Arakawa and she would become one of the primary interpreters of Arakawa’s work.

Gins published three books: the experimental novel Word Rain (or a Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969); What The President Will Say and Do!! (New York: Station Hill, 1984), an excursion into identity, language and free speech using the devices of political rhetoric; and Helen Keller or Arakawa (Santa Fe: Burning Books with East/West Cultural Studies, 1994), an art-historical novel that took on a form of speculative fiction.

With Arakawa, Gins developed the philosophy of ‘procedural architecture’ to further its impact on human lives. These ideas were explored through three books that she co-authored with Arakawa: Pour ne Pas Mourir/To Not to Die (Éditions de la Différence, Paris 1987); Architectural Body (University of Alabama Press, 2002); and Making Dying Illegal – Architecture Against Death: Original to the 21st Century (Roof Books, New York, 2006). …Gins also completed the manuscript for Alive Forever and the illustrated version of her poem Krebs Cycle.–http://www.reversibledestiny.org/arakawa-and-madeline-gins/madeline-gins



 

http://www.reversibledestiny.org/arakawa-and-madeline-gins/madeline-gins/bibliography1

Word rain; or, A discursive introduction to the intimate philosophical investigations of G,r,e,t,a, G,a,r,b,o, it says. New York, Grossman Publishers, 1969. Firestone Library » PS3557.I5 W6 1969; Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-94763388

For example (a critique of never) = Par esempio (una critica del mai): a melodrama / by Madeline Gins and Arakawa (from The mechanism of meaning). [Place of publication not identified]: A. Castelli, [1974?]. Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-94765342

The mechanism of meaning: work in progress (1963-1971, 1978) based on the method of Arakawa / Arakawa and Madeline H. Gins; [editor, Ellen Schwartz]. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1979. N7359.A7 G56; Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-97151300

What the president will say and do!! / Madeline Gins. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, c1984. Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-33922780

To not to die / Arakawa, Madeline Gins = Shinanai tame ni / Arakawa Shūsaku, Madorin Ginzu; Miura Masashi yaku. Tōkyō: Riburo Pōto, 1988. PS3557.I5 T66 1988

Helen Keller or Arakawa / Madeline Gins. Santa Fe, N.M.: Burning Books; New York: East-West Cultural Studies: D.A.P., distributor, c1994. PS3557.I5 H44 1994; Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-94763370

Reversible destiny: Arakawa/Gins / [organized by Michael Govan]. New York: Guggenheim Museum: Distributed by H.N. Abrams, c1997. Marquand Library » Oversize N7359.A7 G562 1997q

Architectural body / Madeline Gins and Arakawa. Tuscaloosa, Ala.; London: University of Alabama Press, c2002. Architecture Library » NA2500 .G455 2002. Marquand Library » NA2500 .G455 2002

Making dying illegal: architecture against death: original to the 21st century / Arakawa and Madeline Gins; introduction by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. New York: Roof Books, 2006. HQ1073 .A73 2006g

Candy Mountain

Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer, Candy Mountain (Zurich: Metropolis Film World Sales / Xanadu Film, [1987]). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process.

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired the original promotional book and program for the film Candy Mountain written by Rudy Wurlitzer and directed by Wurlitzer and Robert Frank. “The film was set in New York City and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where both men have homes. It is a road film, based upon the lives and journeys of the collaborators. Music and musicians have played large roles in each man’s life; therefore, many of the roles in the film are played by musicians.” Both the preview video and the full movie are available on YouTube, linked in below.

The cast includes Kevin J. O’Connor, Harris Yulin, Tom Waits, Bulle Ogier, Leon Redbone, Dr. John, David Johansen, Rita MacNeil, and Ralph Carney. The booklet offers a synopsis, interviews with Frank and Wurlitzer, a filmography, selected exhibition list and bibliography for both principals, and selected chronology for several of the actors and musicians.

“Review/Film; Hitting the Highway. Candy Mountain directed by Robert Frank, Rudy Wurlitzer” by Caryn James, New York Times June 10, 1988:

In an 80’s twist on Jack Kerouac’s myth of the open road, ”Candy Mountain” presents the least self-reflective hero ever to hit the highway. Julius (Kevin O’Connor) is a sometime guitarist and a persistent con man, hired to track down a reclusive, brilliant guitar maker named Elmore Silk. The directors, Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer (who also wrote the screenplay), set Julius traveling on the fringes of society, for the film asserts, in its lighthearted, unpretentious way, that the spirit of our times can be found in those margins. It turns out to be a sardonic spirit, embodied in Julius’s mercenary quest for a guru who refuses to dispense wisdom. …The film avoids oracular statements, so when Elmore says, ”Freedom doesn’t have much to do with the road one way or another,” it takes on the authority of simple truth. ”Candy Mountain” … seems to be a small, quirky film, but it easily assumes the weight, ambition and success that many larger films aim for and miss.

Preview

Film. See 19:58 Waits sings “Once more before I go.”

Proofs of papal coins


A curious collection of proof etchings of coins and medals from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries from the Papal mint of Bologna, with a few coins depicting ‘temporal’ rulers such as Giovannni II Bentivoglio of Bologna, Giovanni Sforza (first husband of Lucrezia Borgia), and Charles V, the great enemy of the Papacy.

The manuscript notes that accompany a few of the plates, referring to books or noting prices, might suggest that the etchings were produced to document a private collection. It is also possible that these were proof etchings for a publication on the subject, although no numismatic reference book with such illustrations has been found.

“The mint of the Emperor Henry VI was established at Bologna in 1194, and nearly all of the coins struck there bear the motto BONONIA DOCET, or BONONIA MATER STUDIORUM. The baiocchi of Bologna were called bolognini; the gold bolognino was equivalent to a gold sequin. The lira, also a Bolognese coin, was worth 20 bolognini. These coins were struck in the name of the commune; it is only from the time when Bologna was recovered by the Holy See, under Clement VI, that Bolognese coins may be regarded as papal.”–http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10334a.htm

Oliver Cromwell


The Laurence Hutton Death Mask collection includes 3 copies of the Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) death mask from the original at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Note only one has a wart over the eyebrow. Hutton wrote about them in Portraits in Plaster, pp. 206-13, quoted here at length.

…Cromwell, according to the Commonwealth Mercury of November 23, 1658, was buried that day at the east end of the chapel of Henry VII., in Westminster Abbey. Dean Stanley accepted this as an established fact, notwithstanding the several reports, long current, that the body was thrown into the Thames, or laid in the field of Naseby, or carried to the vault of the Claypoles in the parish church of Northampton, or stolen during a heavy tempest in the night, or placed in the coffin of Charles I. at Windsor, Mr. Samuel Pepys being responsible for the last wild statement. After the Restoration this same Mr. Pepys saw the disinterred head of Cromwell in the interior of Westminster Hall, although all the other authorities agree in stating that, with the heads of Ireton and Bradshaw, it adorned the outer walls of that building. It may be stated, by the way, that a trustworthy friend of Mr. Pepys, and a fellow-diarist, one John Evelyn witnessed “the superb funeral of the Lord Protector.”

He was carried from Somerset House in a velvet bed-of-state to Westminster Abbey, according to this latter authority; and “it was the joyfullest funeral I ever saw, for there were none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went.” It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Evelyn, or to other eye-witnesses of the funeral, that this was a mock ceremonial, and that the actual body of the Protector was not in the hearse. Both Horace Smith and Cyrus Redding, early in the present century, saw what they fully believed to be the head of Cromwell. It was then in the possession of “a medical gentleman” in London. “The nostrils,” said Redding, “were filled with a substance like cotton. The brain had been extracted by dividing the scalp. The membranes within were perfect, but dried up, and looked like parchment. The decapitation had evidently been performed after death, as the state of the flesh over the vertebrae of the neck plainly showed.

A correspondent of the London Times, signing himself “Senex,” wrote to that journal, under date December 31, 1874, a full history of this head, in which he explained that at the end of five-and-twenty years it was blown down one stormy night, and picked up by a sentry, whose family sold it to one of the Cambridgeshire Russells, who were the nearest living descendants of the Cromwells. By them it was sold, and it was exhibited at several places in London. “Senex” gave the following account of the recognition of the head by Flaxman, the sculptor: “Well,” said Flaxman, I know a great deal about the configuration of the head of Oliver Cromwell. He had a low, broad forehead, large orbits to his eyes, a high septum to the nose, and high cheekbones; but there is one feature which will be with me a crucial test, and that is that instead of having the lower jawbone somewhat curved, it was particularly short and straight, but set out at an angle, which gave him a jowlish appearance. The head,” continued “Senex,” “exactly answered to the description, and Flaxman went away expressing himself as convinced and delighted.”

Another, and an earlier account, dated 1813, says that “the countenance has been compared by Mr. Flaxman, the statuary, with a plaster cast of Oliver’s face taken after his death [of which there are several in London], and he [Flaxman] declares the features are perfectly similar.” Whether or not the body of the real Cromwell was dug up at the Restoration, and whether his own head, or that of some other unfortunate, was exposed on a spike to the fury of the elements for a quarter of a century on Westminster Hall, are questions which, perhaps, will never be decided. The head which Flaxman saw, as it is to be found engraved in contemporary prints, is not the head the cast of which is now in my possession, although it bears a certain resemblance thereto. Mine is probably “the cast from the face taken [immediately] after his death,” of which, as we have seen, several copies were known to exist in Flaxman’s time. It is, at all events, very like to the Cromwell who has been handed down to posterity by the limners and the statuaries of his own court.

Thomas Carlyle was familiar with it, and believed in it, and he avowedly based upon it his famous picture of the Protector: “Big massive head, of somewhat leonine aspect; wart above the right eyebrow; nose of considerable blunt aquiline proportions; strict yet copious lips, full of all tremulous sensibility, and also, if need were, of all fierceness and rigor; deep, loving eyes, call them grave, call them stern, looking from under those shaggy brows as if in lifelong sorrow, and yet not thinking it sorrow, thinking it only labor and endeavor; on the whole, a right noble lion-face and hero-face; and to me it was royal enough.” The copy of the Cromwell mask in the Library of Harvard College is thus inscribed: “A cast from the original mask taken after death, once owned by Thomas Woolner, Sculptor. It was given by him to Thomas Carlyle, who gave it, in 1873, to Charles Eliot Norton, from whom Harvard College received it in 1881.”

A copy of this mask in plaster is in the office of the National Portrait Gallery, in Great George Street, Westminster; and a wax mask, resembling it strongly, although not identical with it, is to be seen in the British Museum. This latter, which is broken in several places, lacks the familiar wart above the right eyebrow. There is no record of either of these casts in either institution, and the authorities and experts of both have no knowledge as to how and when they found their way to their present resting-places.

Rev. Mark Xoble, in his House of Cromwell, however, said that the representative in London of Ferdinand II., of Tuscany, bribed an attendant of Cromwell to permit him to take in secret “a mask of the Protector in plaster of Paris, which was done only a few moments after his Highness’s dissolution.” “A cast from this mould,” he added, “is now in the Florentine Gallery. It is either of bronze, with a brassy hue, or stained to give it that appearance.” Elsewhere Mr. Noble said, writing in 1737, that “the baronial family of Russell are in possession of a wax mask of Oliver, which is supposed to have been taken off while he was living.” After a careful study of all the Florentine galleries in the winter of 1892-93, 1 failed to find this copy of the Cromwell mask or any record of its ever having existed there, although the Pitti Palace contains an original portrait of Cromwell from life by Sir Peter Lely, which was presented by the Protector to this same Grand Duke Ferdinand II.

see also: https://www.princeton.edu/~graphicarts/2008/10/life_and_death_masks.html

The Sun – El Astro Brillante

Invitacion al mundo filosofico para reconocer al sol. verdadero iman conocido [Invitation to the philosophical world to recognize the sun. The true known magnet] found in: J.L.T. .., Historia sucinta de un feliz descubrimiento hecho en uno de los paises del Asia (Madrid: [Don Tomás Jordan, impresor de camara de S.M], 1836). Cover: Descubrimiento oriental, representado en una lamina fina. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

This small, obscure brochure has one engraving by Esteban Boix (born 1774) after a design by D. Domingo presenting Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727); Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794) Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and others contemplating the sun with the author “J.L.T.”

The anonymous writer relates how “he grappled with the nature of light – its propagation, materiality, interaction with the eye etc. – by reading the theories of Lavoisier, ‘immortal’ Newton, Descartes, Huygens, Bernoulli, and Malbranche, but was left confused and dissatisfied.

So one night in summer 1832 he undertook to travel mentally into space to contemplate the sun (‘el astro brillante’), traveling for three quarters of an hour and being oblivious to a fire raging in his village. While the experience left him with a three-day headache, it revealed the sun to him as ‘elVerdadero Iman’, and a new science styled ‘Imanica’.”

This is the only recorded copy in the United States. Thanks to our dealer for the transcription/translation.