Early American Butterflies Alight In South Carolina

by Nancy Mattoon

Watercolor Painting By John Abbot, c.1813.
Latin name: Papilio polyxenes (Fabricius)
English: Black Swallowtail

(All Images Courtesy of Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina.)

The Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina has digitized one of the earliest collections of original watercolor illustrations depicting the butterflies and moths of North America. The Abbot Watercolors Collection consists of 149 paintings of butterflies and moths, mounted and matted, and housed in six blue half morocco cases with gilt-lettered backs. The paintings were created by pioneering artist and naturalist, John Abbot (1751-1840), between 1813 and 1828.

Latin name: Danaus plexippus
English: Monarch

The London-born Abbot was one of the earliest Europeans to record the natural history of North America. Abbot was the son of a noted British barrister, and was expected to follow in his father's footsteps by taking up the law. But, as a boy, he developed a fascination with the animal kingdom, and showed an extraordinary artistic talent. Recognizing that his son had no interest in becoming a lawyer, Abbot's father hired French painter and engraver Jacob Bonneau to teach the boy the fundamentals of book illustration.

Latin name: Eumorpha pandorus
English: Pandorus Sphinx

Abbot's interest in natural history led to friendships with noted London ornithologists and entomologists. He began to collect insect and bird specimens, and made a modest living by selling paintings of them on commission. By 1770 he had earned enough respect to have two of his illustrations of Lepidoptera accepted for display in the London Society of Artists yearly exhibition. Around this same time, Abbot began to express an interest in traveling to North America to document the avian and butterfly species found in the New World.

Latin name: Hypercompe scribonia
English: Great Leopard Moth

John Abbot was fortunate to find a wealthy and influential mentor in London jeweler Dru Drury (1725-1803), an avid insect fancier, who ultimately accumulated one of the most comprehensive private collections of entomological specimens in the world. Drury not only purchased specimens collected overseas, but also funded expeditions throughout the world, with the express purpose of finding new species for his collection. The publication of Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731-1743), the first printed account of the flora and fauna of North America, inspired Drury to send Abbot on a collecting trip to Virginia in 1773. Before leaving London, Abbot formed another business partnership with London jeweler John Francillon (1744-1816), who would act as his agent and sell his paintings to naturalists other than Drury.

Latin name: Hyalophora cecropia
English: Cecropia Silkmoth

Arriving in Virginia in the Fall of 1773, Abbot soon found that the chaos of the Revolutionary War made pursuing his work impossible. He relocated to Georgia within two years, where he remained until his death in 1840. His production of illustrations in the New World was amazingly prolific. He created over two thousand paintings for Francillon alone, many of which are now housed in The Natural History Museum of London. In 1797 Abbot’s drawings were published in The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia by Sir James Edward Smith (1759-1828). The two-volume work, one of the earliest butterfly guides to North America, included one hundred and four hand-colored engravings of Abbot’s paintings, along with Abbot’s notes and observations, written in both French and English.

Latin name: Eacles imperialis
English: Imperial Moth

The paintings in the collection of the Thomas Cooper Library were commissioned by American naturalist John Eatton Le Conte in 1813. Le Conte took the completed illustrations to Paris in 1828, where he began work with Jean Alphonse Boisduval on Histoire générale et iconographie des lépidoptères et des chenilles de l'Amerique septentrionale. Le Conte and Boisduval used some of the Abbot watercolors for the 1833 edition of this work.

Latin name: Citheronia regalis (Fabricius)
English: Royal Walnut Moth

According to the Thomas Cooper Library website, "Boisduval apparently gave the drawings to French lepidopterist Louis M.A. Depuiset (.pdf), who in turn gave them to Charles M. Oberthür, a former student of Boisduval. Four years after the death of Oberthür in 1924, a rare book dealer named La Chavalier purchased Oberthür’s library. The drawings were owned privately for the next thirty-nine years, and the identity of the owner(s) is not known." In November of 1963, Sotheby’s and Company of London sold the watercolors, listed only as 'property of a lady,' to the rare book firm H.P. Kraus of New York City. The University of South Carolina purchased the illustrations from H.P. Kraus in 1964 for the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

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Poe's Tales of Terror Inspire A Royal Exhibit

By Nancy Mattoon

Ivor Abrahams.
Masque of The Red Death.
Print on Paper From The E.A. Poe Series, 1976.
(All Images Courtesy of Royal Academy of Arts.)

Two portfolios of prints, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's chilling and melancholy tales and Edmund Burke's study of the aesthetics of passion and terror, make up a fascinating new exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts. Ivor Abrahams: Mystery and Imagination, brings together, for the first time, two sets of screenprints completed in the 1970's, and considered to be among the finest works created during "the golden age of printmaking in Britain." Abrahams created the two groups of works on paper in response to Poe's definition of art as "the reproduction of what the senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul," and Burke's thesis that pleasure and pain form the emotional and psychological underpinning of all fine art.

Ivor Abrahams.
Untitled Print On Paper From:
15 Lithographs To Edmund Burke, 1979.

Ivor Abrahams is primarily a sculptor, and many of his prints have the depth and magnitude of sculptures. His works are almost always figurative, rather than abstract. According to the Tate Modern, "Portions of buildings, gardens, domestic interiors and people - usually active - inhabit [Abrahams'] works that are fundamentally collages. These are built of photographic images that are cut, altered, painted over and turned into three-dimensional form." Contemporary advertising, especially signs and placards, hold a fascination for Abrahams, and as a struggling artist he once took a job creating shop window mannequins and displays for Adel Rootstein.

Ivor Abrahams.
Untitled Print On Paper From:
15 Lithographs To Edmund Burke, 1979.

Many of the images used in Abrahams' prints are taken from photographs in inexpensive magazines, such as the weekly publication, Amateur Gardening. Less frequently, he appropriated and altered high quality illustrations found in glossy periodicals from the 1920's, such as Country Life. This use of second-hand source material links much of his printed work to the Pop Art movement. Abrahams has donated much of the source material for his printmaking, including magazine clippings, photographs, sketches, and acetate stencils, to the Tate Gallery Archive.

Ivor Abrahams.
The Domain of Arnheim.
Print on Paper From The E.A. Poe Series, 1976.

The history of the Edgar Allan Poe portfolio is especially interesting to book collectors and readers. In late 1973, Abrahams was commissioned by famed New York City gallery owner Bernard Jacobson to illustrate a volume of selected tales and poems by Edgar Allan Poe. The book was to be published as a fine press, limited, signed, and numbered edition of 500 copies, with sixteen illustrations within the text, and four loose prints per volume. It took two years for Abrahams to complete the final collection of twenty prints for publication. Jacobson exhibited the prints in 1976, and announced the impending publication of the book at the show's opening.

Ivor Abrahams.
The Raven.
Print on Paper From The E.A. Poe Series, 1976.

Abrahams had admired Poe's writings since he was a teenager. For the fine press book, he chose to illustrate those stories or poems he felt he "could put an image to." Some were among Poe's most well-known works, such as The Raven. Others were much more obscure, and he commented that he "had a difficult time finding a truly complete edition of Poe's writings." The edition he finally worked from was the three-volume Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969-1978.)

Ivor Abrahams.
A Dream Within A Dream.
Print on Paper From The E.A. Poe Series, 1976.

Noted British art-historian Norbert Lynton created an extended essay on Abrahams' illustrations intended as a preface for the book. In it he wrote, "I suspect that Poe's popularity through text, illustrations and films is part of his attraction for Abrahams. Yet, unlike all the films and most of the illustrations, his images show little desire to profit from the more thrilling aspects of Poe... Abrahams un-Hollywoods Poe but uses some of Hollywood's tricks to do so. His other means are astonishingly un-period, un-hagiographic, ahistorical - in short, devoid of nostalgia. He is a plastic artist, a sculptor whose primary means of expression are form and interval. His images show a marked response to the constructive artist in Poe and much less attachment to the incidents that others focused on."

Ivor Abrahams.
Ligeia .
Print on Paper From The E.A. Poe Series, 1976.

In what can only be seen as a tremendous missed opportunity, the planned limited edition of the works of Poe as illustrated by Abrahams was never published due to logistical and financial difficulties. A portfolio of the prints was produced, and it contained a few excerpts from Lynton's essay. In what seems to be the finally indignity related to the project, the manuscript of Norbert Lynton's essay has been lost, so only the brief passages of it included in the portfolio remain.

Ivor Abrahams.
The Conqueror Worm.
Print on Paper From The E.A. Poe Series, 1976.

Ivor Abrahams: Mystery and Imagination,The ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ and ‘Edmund Burke’ Print Portfolios, continues through May 22, 2011 at the Tennant Gallery of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Ivor Abrahams.
Silence, A Fable.
Print on Paper From The E.A. Poe Series, 1976.

Specifics of the published Poe portfolio:

Abrahams, Ivor.
E.A. Poe: Tales and Poems.
New York: Bernard Jacobson Ltd., 1976.
Portfolio of twenty screenprints, some with embossing and/or varnish, various sizes, on wove Crisbrook paper 495 × 362 (19 1/2 × 14 1/4); printed by Bernard Culls at Advanced Graphics and published by Bernard Jacobson Ltd in an edition of 100 plus 10 sets of artist's proofs, each inscribed ‘Ivor Abrahams 76’ below image...each stamped with the printer's stamp ‘ADVANCED GRAPHICS LONDON’ in circular device.

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Justice Is Blind--And Beautiful--At Yale Library

By Nancy Mattoon

Code Penal: commentaires imagés de Joseph Hémard.
Paris : Editions Littéraires de France, [192u?]
(All Images Courtesy of Lillian Goldman Law Library.)

The personification of Lady Justice as a goddess balancing the scales of truth and fairness dates back at least to Ancient Egypt and the Goddess Maat, as shown in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Maat later morphed into the better known Isis, and was then co-opted by the Romans, who renamed her Justitia. But whatever name she is given, Lady Justice with her scales, and later her blindfold and sword, remains a beautiful and compelling figure in paintings, sculptures, and, of course, book illustrations. Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library specializes in collecting rare, illustrated law books, and has recently expanded an already fascinating online collection of images of Justitia in all her glory from it's massive collection of rare volumes.

Corvinus, Johannes Arnoldi.
Iurisprudentia Romana.
Amsterdam, 1644.

According to a February blog entry by rare book librarian Mike Widener, "This past month I've added 44 additional images containing depictions of Justitia (Lady Justice), to our Flickr gallery Justitia: Iconography of Justice...For the past several months I've been scouring our collection for such images, and also buying books containing images of Justitia, as part of our collecting focus on illustrated law books."

Calcografia dal vol. I di:
Dei delitti e delle pene edizione novissima...
Bassano: a spese Remondini di Venezia, 1797.

Widener also notes that the new images of Lady Justice are linked to the recent publication of a book by Yale Law professors Judith Resnik and Dennis E. Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-states and Democratic Courtrooms (Yale University Press, 2011). Professors Resnik and Curtis are also conducting a seminar for Yale Law School in the Spring 2011 semester based on their book.

Diploma der allergnädigsten Privilegien so Ihro Königliche
Majestät zu Hungarn und Böheim,
Ertz-Hertzogin zu Oesterreich, &c. &c.
Maria Theresia, denen Botzner-Märckten ertheilet.
Botzen: Daselbst zu finden, 1744.

Goddess Justitia has also been the muse for the latest exhibition at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Life and Law in Early Modern England. Co-sponsored by the Library and Yale's Elizabethan Club, the exhibition reflects the ways in which, "English law not only underwent deep changes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but also played a leading role in politics and culture." Life and Law in Early Modern England is part of the year-long Centenary celebration of Yale's Elizabethan Club, founded in 1911 as a meeting place for conversation and discussion of literature and the arts. The exhibit was curated by Justin Zaremby, a 2010 graduate of the Yale Law School, with assistance from Mike Widener.

Statutvm terrae Sancti Archangeli
duplici indice illustratum.
Ravennae: typis Io. Baptiste Patij, 1669.

In his introduction to the exhibit, Zaremby writes, "The occasion of the Club's Centenary provides the opportunity to bring together two impressive collections of early modern texts at Yale to illustrate a rich moment in English legal history." The books and manuscripts on display date from 1570 to the 1670s. They include guides to legal practice, textbooks, a play performed at an Inn of Court, and works dealing with church-state relations, legal philosophy, court jurisdiction, and the claim of Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne. Among the authors included are several of the era's leading figures, such as Francis Bacon, Francis Beaumont, Lord Burghley, Edward Coke, and John Selden.

Maximae juris celebriores,
deductae ex jure canonico, civili, glossa.
Tyrnaviae: Typis Academicis, S. Jesu, 1742.

Life and Law in Early Modern England is on display February-May 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery of the Lillian Goldman Law Library. It will also be made available online through posts several times each week on Mike Widener's fascinating Rare Books Blog. One such post revealed that an Italian law library has also devoted a website to images of Lady Justice. The Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia's Immagini della Giustizia includes images of Justitia from the frontispieces, headpieces, initials, and architectural borders of printed books, as well as a discussion of the iconography of her scales, sword, and blindfold. With the obvious joy of a man more than a little in love with Lady Justice, Yale librarian Mike Widener notes: "Our rare book collection owns very few of the examples in the Modena website, so I have new titles to pursue!"

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Tigers Burn Bright At Princeton

By Nancy Mattoon

Max Bolliger.
Der goldene Apfel: Eine Geschichte.
Illustrated by Celestino Piatti.
Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1970.
(All Images Courtesy Of Cotsen Children's Library.)

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake, 1794.

André Hellé. Grosse bêtes & petites bêtes.
Paris: Tolmer & Cie, ca. 1912.

According to The Cambridge Companion to William Blake (2003), The Tyger is "the most anthologized poem in English." And when the Animal Planet television network conducted a poll in 2004, asking viewers to name "their favorite animal," the tiger came out on top at 21%, beating out even man's best friend. (Dogs came in second at 20%.) Moreover, various species of tigers are the national animal for the countries of Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Malaysia, North Korea and South Korea. (Finally something both Korea's can agree on!) All of which proves the enormous tabby cat we call the tiger is a very popular fellow around the globe. That's one reason why Princeton University's Cotsen Children's Library devoted an exhibition to tigers as depicted in its historic picture book collection.

Samuil Marshak. Detki v kletke [Children in a Cage].
Illustrations by Evgenii Charushin.
3rd ed. Moscow: Detgiz, 1947.

Of course, Princeton University had another reason to celebrate Panthera tigris. Like the Detroit Major League baseball team, the English rugby club of Leicester, and the Louisiana State University football team, among many others, the Princeton athletic team mascot is the tiger. According to the Princeton Parent's Handbook, "Originally, Princeton's mascot was the lion—seen by the administration as the most regal animal. However, in 1867 the sophomore baseball team decided to adorn orange ribbons with black numerals. The orange and black combination stuck and by the early 1880s florid sports writers began to refer to Princeton's teams as the Tigers."

Book of Animals. Mounted on Linen.
Springfield, MA: McLoughlin Bros. Inc.,
[between 1920-1929?].

The adoption of the tiger as Princeton's mascot may have been accidental, but that hasn't made it any less beloved. In 2007, after over 125 years of having a nameless tiger symbolize their sporting excellence, Princeton's Athletic department sponsored an online contest to "Name The Tiger." The overwhelming response was: "Don't Name Princeton's Mascot." Students and faculty alike resented the fact that the naming contest took place over the summer, when most of them weren't even on campus. And a Facebook page was created to complain that "commercialization" of the mascot would be an unnecessary break with tradition. In the end, the nameless Princeton Tiger got a graphic "facelift" of its official logo, but remained, as always, unnamed.

Bentsyion Raskin. Di hun vas gevolt hobn a kam.
[The Hen Who Wanted a Comb].
Illustrated by El Lissitsky.
Kiev: Yidisher Folks-Farlag, 1919.


William Ralston and C.W. Cole.
Tippoo: A Tale of a Tiger etc., etc.
(Routledge's Shilling Toy Books 115)
London, New York: G. Routledge & Sons, [1886].

Princeton's Tiger may be forever nameless, but many named tigers have graced the pages of literature. In The Jungle Book (1894), Kipling's deadly Shere Khan got his name from a combination of the Urdu/Hindi name for "tiger "(shere) and that language's word for "king" (khan). At the other end of the spectrum from Kipling's menacing lord of the jungle, A.A. Milne created the ever-bouncing Tigger, one of the happiest creatures in Winnie The Pooh's hundred acre wood, in 1928. And more recently, the Man Booker Prize-winning, Life of Pi (2001) by Yann Martel featured a tiger stranded on the Pacific Ocean named "Richard Parker." That name, in turn, came from a novel by Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative Of Gordon Pym (1838), which featured a dog named "Tiger," and a mutinous sailor named "Richard Parker."

Harry B. Neilson, author-illustrator. An Animal A B C.
London, Glasgow, Bombay: Blackie and Son Ltd., 1901.

Popular culture hasn't shied away from the majestic tiger, either. The bookish, artistic, and conscientious, Hobbes the tiger makes up the smarter half of the comic strip duo of Calvin and Hobbes. In a much darker cartoon depiction of the tiger, famed political cartoonist Thomas Nast used the big cat to symbolize the evil political machine known as "Tammany Hall." Nast notoriously depicted the corrupt "Tammany Tiger" devouring American democracy. Back on the lighter side is Kellogg's famous "Tony The Tiger." Tony apparently thrives on sugared corn flakes, making him the world's only vegetarian tiger.

Qi hu yongshi: yi zu min jian chuan ji
[Brave Tiger Rider: I Tribe Folk Tales].
Illustrated by Qinchu Guo.
Shanghai: Shao nian er tong chu ban she, 1963.

The ubiquity of the tiger as an image of beauty, strength, and majesty makes it easy to forget that this magnificent, striped cat is a highly endangered species. According to the website Big Cat Rescue, "Tiger numbers in the wild are thought to have plunged from 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century to between 1,500 and 3,500 today (2009)." There are now more tigers in captivity than living in their natural habitat. The tiger has become a worldwide symbol of conservation, and one can only hope its popularity with its greatest enemy, man, will allow this amazing creature to escape extinction.
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The Good Old (Bad Old) Days Of Health Care

By Nancy Mattoon

Hans von Gersdorff.
Feldtbüch der Wundartzney.
Strassburg: Durch Joannem Schott, [1517].
(All Images Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University.)
This is the first image of an amputation ever printed.

The latest struggle over health care reform in the United States has made some nostalgic for "the good old days" of medicine. Remember when the trusted family doctor, the same one who delivered you, made house calls and looked after the health of your family from cradle to grave? Neither do I. Realistically, the only way that scenario ever played out was due to the high mortality rate during childbirth, and the frequent untimely deaths of young people from contagious diseases, infections, and unsanitary conditions.

Jakob Rüff.
De Conceptu et Generatione Hominis ...
Zurich: Christophorus Froschouerus, 1554.
Ruff was responsible for the training and licensing of all midwives in Zurich.

At least in terms of medical science, we are fortunate to be living in the 21st century. A look back at rare books from the 16th and 17th centuries, courtesy of Indiana University's Lilly Library, makes two things abundantly clear. It was a time of some of the greatest medical discoveries in history, including the first understanding of the circulation of the blood, and it was a time you are very lucky NOT to have experienced firsthand as a patient.

Johannes Scultetus.
Wund Artzneyisches Zeüg–Haüsz ...
Frankfurt: In Verlegung Johann Gerlins ...
Buchhändlers in Ulm,
Gedruckt bey Johann Gerlin, 1666.
Torture or surgery? You be the judge...

Until the usage of ether, in the 1840's, surgical anesthesia was truly a hit or miss proposition. Mandrake, henbane, devil's trumpet, and thorn-apple were all used as herbal anesthesia, but the problem here was not enough meant excruciating pain during the operation, but too much meant freedom from pain entirely, forever... So the next time you're getting a tooth pulled or drilled, be thankful that most of the pain will be masked, and you'll probably live to tell the tale, too. And that's the tip of the pain iceberg--think about undergoing abdominal surgery while fully alert--or don't.

George Bartisch.
Ophthalmodouleia, das ist Augendienst ...
[Dresden: Matthes Stöckel], 1583.
This illustration shows off the latest tools of the opthalmology trade.

Many of the great medical advances of the 17th century came about as a result of plant, animal, and human dissection and vivisection. As an exhibit of the Lilly Library's first rate collection of historical medical texts tells us, "Anatomia Animata is a phrase used at the time referring to vivisection...but it also conveys the sense of animation that can be seen in many of the striking images of anatomical and medical books on display." Many of these images are classically beautiful, but just as many look like they came straight out of the latest torture porn fest. (Thankfully without the latest cinematic visual "advances" a la Saw 3D-The Final Chapter.)

Gaspare Tagliacozzi.
De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem: Libri Duo ...
Venice: Apud Gasparem Bindonum Iuniorem, 1597.
A nose job, 16th century style. From the first plastic surgery book ever printed.

Another thing those longing for the old days of the family physician would do well to remember is that for centuries the actual "hands on" of medical care was deemed beneath the dignity of a physician. University trained doctors would study texts, perform experiments and dissections, and document findings, but the actual surgeries, deliveries, and applications of treatments were handled by barbers, midwives, and apothecaries. Something to think about before you make a stink about that Physician's Assistant or Nurse-Practitioner taking care of your ailment rather than an M.D.

Thomas Bartholin.
Acta Medica et Philosophica Hafniensia.
Copenhagen: Sumptibus Petri Haubold, 1673–[80].
The "baby" in David Lynch's Eraserhead, only 300 years earlier.

And at least our physicians now have a general understanding of how the human body functions. They no longer believe women's ovaries are "female testicles" that manufacture sperm, or that conception came about when sperm combined with menstrual blood, or that lustful thoughts during intercourse created monstrously deformed offspring. (And you thought your Gynecologist was judgmental!)

Giulio Cesare Casseri.
De Vocis Auditusque Organis Historia Anatomica ...
Ferrara: Excudebat Victorius Baldinus, [1600–1601].
Does the title page show some of the Casseri's less fortunate patients?

Whatever improvements are still needed in our medical care, we've come a long way in the last 400 years. Four centuries from now--if mankind is still here on earth-- our technologies and treatments today will certainly appear barbaric and backward. But for now, compared to any other time, the industrialized world is in a medical golden age. We all know, at least in the United States, health care could be a lot better. But looking backward brings home the fact that in the "good old days," things were a lot worse.

Persia's Book Of Kings Gets The Royal Treatment At Cambridge

By Nancy Mattoon

A Hero Fights A Demon.
An Image From The Shahnameh,
Or Persian Book Of Kings.
(All Images Courtesy of The Fitzwilliam Museum.)

The Shahnameh, or " Persian Book of Kings," is the national epic of the Iranian people. The longest poem ever written by a single author, this chronicle of the reigns of fifty monarchs was completed exactly 1,000 years ago by the Persian poet Ferdowsi, who dedicated his life to crafting its 60,000 verses.

Ferdowsi’s importance in Persian language and literature has been compared to that of Goethe for the Germans, of Pushkin for the Russians, or of Shakespeare for the English-speaking world. A new exhibit at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge contains almost 100 illustrations from rare manuscript books spanning nearly eight centuries of this tale of myth, legend, and history.

A Hero Endures A Trial By Fire.

The exhibit, Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is the largest display of its kind ever shown in a British museum. Artworks inspired by this poem, which tells the story of Persia from the beginning of time through the Arab conquest in the 7th century, have been gathered together from the British Museum, the Bodleian Library and the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

Timothy Potts, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, says: "It is impossible to overstate the significance of Ferdowsi's Book of Kings, which remains, a millennium after its completion, one of the most popular texts of secular poetry in Southwest Asia. In its ambition, scope and spectacular range of displays, this exhibition at the Fitzwilliam is truly a landmark and for many visitors will be a revelatory introduction to the Shahnameh and its world."

A Vanquished Demon
Is Bound By The Hero.

During the thousand years since its completion, illustrated manuscripts of The Shahnameh have spread Persian culture from Egypt and Anatolia to India and Central Asia. The enormous popularity of its stories and characters, and their depiction by a wide range of artists in various media, allow the illustrated editions of The Shahnameh to become a microcosm for all of Persian art from the 12th until the 19th century.

In early manuscripts the pictures are small and simple, fitting within the larger text. But over the years they increase in size and become much more elaborate, even including the use of decorative gold, lapis lazuli, and other precious pigments. The Shahnameh texts evolved into works similar to the heavily embellished illuminated manuscripts from the monasteries of Europe.

A Miniature Painting Inspired By The Shahnameh.

Wealthy patrons commissioned manuscripts of greater and greater magnificence, each hoping to possess the most lavish edition of the epic ever created. Splendid pictures often crowded out the text, and the artistic influence of China, India, and Central Asia could be seen in the the style of the illustrations. The earliest illustrations on show at the Fitzwilliam Museum are from the 1300's, and they continued to be produced until the mid-19th century.

The tradition of hand-illustrating books in this painstaking way survived in Persia for nearly another three centuries after it ended in Europe. The Shahnameh was also the inspiration for thousands of miniature paintings, produced separately from any manuscript. These paintings were created by Persian, Arab, Turkish, Mongol, Kurdish, and Indian artists commissioned to recreate favorite scenes from the epic for the royalty and nobility.

A Court Scene From The Poem,
Highlighting Music And Dance.

Aside from artistic value, one reason The Shahnameh remains so central to Iranian literature is because it was written in Persian rather than Arabic. Ferdowsi is widely regarded as the preserver of the Persian language and of pre-Islamic Iranian culture. Of all the peoples conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century, the Persians are the only ones who can boast a major literature in the indigenous language that they were using before the conquest, according to the Cambridge exhibit.

Unlike the English language of a work such as Beowulf, the Persian of Ferdowsi's poem changed very little over the centuries. The Persian reader needs no "translation" into modern language to fully understand the poem just as its original audience did. Ferdowsi went to great lengths to avoid using any words of Arabic origin. Children in Iran still study The Shahnameh in school, and many memorize portions of it in the same way that English speakers learn to recite passages from Shakespeare.

A Dragon Devours An Unlucky Would-Be Slayer.

Charles Melville, professor of Persian history at Cambridge, tells us that Ferdowsi was a wealthy landowner who spent at least 30 years writing his epic poem. It is a huge text, twice as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. It explores not only the royal history of Persia, but also goes back to the days of mythic kings, who were slayers of dragons and demons. The work contains battle scenes and other heroics, but also romance and light-hearted games of polo.

The exhibition curator, Barbara Brend, explains that there are three distinct sections of the work, "There's a legendary, mythical bit at the beginning then a middle section covering Alexander the Great. The last section deals with a real dynasty, the Sasanians." Each of the illustrations of The Shahnameh at the Fitzwilliam shows an event in the epic, whether a battle scene, the combat between a warrior and a fantastical creature, or a King courting his ladylove.

An Illustration Of A Scene From The Epic
Featuring Alexander The Great. (At Left.)

By the time Ferdowsi finally got close to finishing his work, he was beginning to run short of money. He presented his still unfinished epic to his patron, Mahmud of Ghazni, in hopes that the sultan would be pleased enough to advance him some cash. Sadly, things had changed since the work was begun: the pre-Islamic era was past, and a poem in Persian was viewed with suspicion.

Professor Melville remarks, "He wasn't a court poet, a flatterer. And it's possible that he was suspected of Zoroastrian sympathies, the pre-Islamic religion. So he wasn't accepted by the religious authorities either." Ferdowsi died in 1020, fearing his poem was a failure. Fitzwilliam Museum director Timothy Potts says Ferdowsi’s words were initially greeted with hostility, "His poem was to be a paean to a Persian past that struggled to maintain itself against Arab, Turkish and other peoples and ways of life."

A Battle Scene Between Rival Factions.

The Shahnameh went virtually underground for nearly 200 years after its completion, with only a few brief quotations and references to the work in existence. By the 13th century the epic had begun to return to favor, although copies of the text made 200 years after Ferdowsi's death undoubtedly contain both errors and "improvements." According to the Cambridge Museum, only three manuscripts are known to have survived from before the end of the 13th century: an incomplete copy of 1217, a full text of 1276 and a third, undated copy from this period. None of these is illustrated.

A Magicial Scene
Near The End Of The Persian Epic.

But the universal themes of The Shahnameh allowed it to survive through the centuries. Its tales of power and glory, ambition and failure, wisdom and folly all resonate across generations and even cultures. (The poem was translated into Arabic and Ottoman Turkish early on, and eventually into many of the world's modern languages.)

"Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh has been the wellspring of Persian culture for the past thousand years," says Timothy Potts. "Other cultures have their literary icons – Homer for the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare for the English, Dante for the Italians. But none of these exercised quite the defining influence on so many levels of culture and identity up to the present day as The Shahnameh did for the Persians."

Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge will be on display through January of 2011. Highlights of the show are also available in an excellent virtual exhibit on the museum's website.
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Take A Peake At The Twentieth Century's Optimum Alice

Mervyn Peake's 20th Century Update Of Alice.

(All Images Courtesy Of The Estate Of Mervyn Peake and The British Library.)

Is there anything more difficult for an artist than to reinvent, or even try to improve upon, a classic? Sensible creative types (and that's not necessarily an oxymoron) know better than to risk it. Daredevils who choose to attempt it will turn tail and run after watching one shockingly bad example: Gus Van Sant's inexplicable shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

But every once in a while a unique talent with a fresh point of view really can make something old new again. Such an artist strikes the perfect balance between reverence for his source and relevance to his audience. A new exhibit at Yorkshire's Sheffield University Library displays 22 pen and ink drawings and 5 rough sketches which prove that tweaking the traditional can, very rarely, result in a modern masterpiece.

Peake's Rough Sketch Of Alice
Graduating From Pawn To Queen.

The exhibit, Mervyn Peake's Alice, is one of the first to feature material from an archive acquired by the British Library in April of 2010. Author, illustrator, painter, and poet Mervyn Peake is perhaps best known as the creator of the three-volume Gothic-Fantasy tour-de-force, Gormenghast. But Peake also illustrated the work of authors he admired, such as Charles Dickens, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson, and, of course, Lewis Carroll. A complete set of his original pen and ink drawings for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was part of the voluminous collection of letters, manuscripts, notebooks, sketches, and typescripts, obtained by the library from the Mervyn Peake Estate.

Alice Meets
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Peake was already a successful painter when he was asked to illustrate Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark in 1941. As a student of fine art, he turned to the masterworks of other illustrators, including Hogarth, Cruickshank, Durer, Blake, Dore, Goya, to perfect his own technique. Peake's illustrative style is noted for its fluid lines, subtle plays of light and shadow, and exacting use of stippling and cross-hatching. There is nothing hackneyed , broad, or leaden in his work. And as a writer himself, he maintained complete respect for the text he had agreed to enhance. The illustrator, he said, should "subordinate [himself] totally to the book, and slide into another man's soul."

Tenniel's Alice Goes Through The Looking Glass.

When he set out to illustrate Alice's Adventures In Wonderland in 1945, Peake knew he had more to deal with than embellishing Lewis Carroll's prose. John Tenniel's wood-cut illustrations for the 1865 first edition of the book were created in close concert with the author. They were so integral to the text that all 2,000 copies of the first printing were recalled when Tenniel found their reproduction of his illustrations to be of inferior quality. A second print run was ordered, and the book became an instant best-seller. Peake was well aware that Tenniel's work was inextricable from Carroll's text for many readers: "He is inviolate, for he is embedded in the very fabric of childhood memories."

Peake's Alice Goes Through
The Mirror Crack'd.

But Peake had tremendous faith in his artistic talent. He was willing to gamble that his 20th century painter's eye could bring a fresh perspective to Carroll's Victorian text. Tenniel's view of Alice was colored by the manners and morals of his age, and by his background as a cartoonist. He was a master of the style of illustration favored by the 19th century upper crust, and his conservative political cartoons were a regular feature in Punch. His Alice is quite a proper, if unusually adventurous, young lady. Peake's Alice is very much a creation of the 20th century.

Peake's Rough Sketch
Of The Queen Of Hearts.

Mervyn Peake's artistic vision was shaped by his exposure to three distinct cultures. He grew up in a walled compound built for English missionaries in pre-revolutionary China. As a young man he returned to England, in the twilight of the empire between the two world wars. Finally, he was a post-war artist, acting as an illustrator for journalists documenting conditions in battle-scarred Europe. One of Peake's first post-war assignments was a 1945 stint in Germany. Here he witnessed first hand the bombed-out rubble which was all that remained of what had been the city of Bonn. As Peake observed in a letter to his wife: "Terrible as the bombing of London was, it is absolutely nothing – nothing compared with this unutterable desolation." But there was worse to come as he continued his travels through the ruined nation.

Mervyn Peake Sketches
Amidst The Ruins Of Germany. (1945)

In a heart wrenching letter home, Peake wrote of the Cologne Cathedral, the lone building left standing in a sea of wreckage and debris: "Bonn was nothing to Cologne from the point of view of destruction. It is incredible how the cathedral has remained, lifting itself high into the air so gloriously, while around it the city lies broken to pieces, and in the city I smelt for the first time in my life the sweet, pungent, musty smell of death. It is still in the air, thick, sweet, rotten and penetrating… But the cathedral arises like a dream – something quite new to me as an experience – a tall poem of stone with sudden, inspired flair of the lyric and yet with the staying power, mammoth qualities and abundance of the epic. Before it and beside me stood a German soldier, still in his war-worn, greeny-coloured uniform. His face betrayed nothing. Cologne lay about him like a shattered life – a memory torn out."

The Comsumptive, Belsen 1945.

But a final memory from Germany haunted Peake most of all. He was one of the first civilians to enter the just liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. His harrowing sketches of the victims who survived unimaginable horrors there are the human equivalent of the Cologne Cathedral. They are the last bastion of humanity left standing in a hell on earth where men, women, and children were routinely and relentlessly murdered; reduced to anonymous corpses dumped in mass graves, or incinerated into piles of ash. Like the cathedral, the survivors of this ultimate evil "arise like a dream" from a human wasteland rank with the "thick, sweet, rotten and penetrating" smell of death.

Peake's White Rabbit
In His Nightmarish Wonderland.

Peake's experiences in post-war Germany, along with witnessing the fall of the Imperial China as a child and the decline of the British Empire as an adult, had a profound effect on his art. This shows most notably in his own dark creations, but is no less omnipresent in his illustrations for the works of other authors. It is readily seen in the Alice In Wonderland illustrations now on show in Sheffield. Peake's Alice is a dewy-eyed gamine set adrift in a very dark and dangerous Wonderland.

The Duchess And Her Baby:
Two Of Wonderland's Grotesques.

Unlike Tenniel's Victorian lass, with a moral compass forever set to return her to the true North of proper society, Peake's Alice seems far more capable of succumbing to the topsy-turvy, dog-eat-dog anarchy that reigns in Wonderland. The reader feels a genuine fear for her safety in a sea filled with monstrous grotesques, where she may or may not be able to keep her head above water--or even attached to her shoulders. Mervyn Peake's Alice both enriches Carroll's text, and illuminates it in a way impossible for a 19th century artist. This Alice starts out as a naive English rose, but her exposure to the winds of Wonderland teaches her the necessity of growing thorns. She's a survivor of a trip to the netherworld, one of the lucky few who make it out alive but lose their innocence and illusions in the process. She returns from Wonderland a wised-up, clued-in sophisticate--impossible for a straitlaced gentleman like Tenniel to imagine, much less depict.

The Mad Tea Party:
Fiddling While Wonderland Burns.

Mervyn Peake was praised by Graham Greene as "the first artist since Tenniel to recast Alice in a contemporary mould." Later acclaimed author Will Self remarked that Peake's version of Carroll's fantasy world was "as valid a depiction of Wonderland as Tenniel's, and arguably the best one achieved since his." Peake's son Sebastian, who opened the exhibition and manages the Peake Estate, including two excellent official websites, said: "I'm sure that had my father been alive he would have been delighted to see his illustrations to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland displayed in such glorious surroundings. With ample space for each drawing to be seen as a separate work within the collection, each of the characters depicted can come to life, reminding the viewer that the basis of any interpretation is vision."

Readers are invited to examine Mervyn Peake's work in person at Sheffield University Library or online at the British Library, and to contemplate what the finest 21st Century artist's vision of Wonderland might look like.

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Previously On Booktryst:
200 Rabbit Holes Await At Canadian Library
Peake Archive Takes British Library To New Heights