A controversial engraving as an early version of a picture story Friday, Nov 28 2008

A detail from a 17th century engraving shows English businessmen John Guy meeting Beothuk in Trinity Bay

An interesting dispute about a copperplate engraving published in 1628 depicting merchants from the Old World trading with Native Americans seems to be settled for now. Canadian archaeologist William Gilbert challenges the traditional interpretation of the scene taking place in New England, but rather interprets it as an early encounter of the English merchant John Guy with Beothuk Indians in Newfoundland, thus making it a part of early Canadian history.

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“Backward countries “and pictorial statements Tuesday, Apr 29 2008

“I became aware that the backward countries of the world are and have been those that have not learned to take full advantage of the possibilities of pictorial statement and communication, and that many of the most characteristic ideas and abilities of our western civilization have been intimately related to our skills exactly to repeat pictorial statements and communications.”

These are the introductory words to the first chapter titled “The blocked road to pictorial communication” in William M. Ivins’ book “Prints and Visual Communication“. While I would agree to the thought that many ideas and cultural values of the western civilisation have been proposed and developed in a close bond with the ability to repeat pictorial statements and communicatios, I started to ponder about the first part. Backward countries? If you call countries backward, how do you define the “forward direction”? Furthermore: assuming that there is something like a backward country: Is it true that such countries did not take full advantage of pictorial statements?

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Galileo Galilei’s forgotten lunar Sketches identified Friday, Mar 30 2007

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is generally credited to be the first scientist to use an optical telescope for astronomical purposes. In 1609, he made his first own “telescopium” and pointed it to the starry nocturnal sky. Thus, he not only discovered four Jupiter moons but also made an important discovery about our own lunar companion: the moon has a jagged surface and is not a smooth spehere. He presented his findings one year later in his famous book Sidereus Nuncius (“Starry Messenger”), illustrated with various copper engravings. Over 500 copies of the book were printed. It was assumed that the original watercolor paintings of the moon, which served as the original for the engravings, were those preserved in the National Library in Florence, Italy. When scientists from Berlin and Padova now compared these drawings with the engravings, it was clear that they differed in many details. They could not be the original drawings used for the engraved illustrations.

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The Crazy Sheep Project has come true Wednesday, Mar 14 2007

Two years ago, Michael Drout over at his Wormtalk and Slugspeak blog got all excited with the idea to extract DNA from old parchment. Nicknamed the “Crazy Sheep DNA Guy” at this time, his dream has now come true, at least to a certain extent.

Parchment is made of animal skin, mostly from goat and sheep, which has been dried and scraped under tension. It was the preferred writing support material for manuscripts and maps from around 200 BC until the 16th century, when it was replaced by paper. In the late Middle Ages, town parchment makers (“parchmenters”) had shops in the vicinity of artisans and trade groups. The picture to the left shows a German parchmenter around 1568 [1].

Parchment was much more expensive than paper, and as such still used later on for high-grade books and prints, notably by etchers in th 17th century (and here we have the link to Oldprints).

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Mathieu or Maurice Blot? Wednesday, Sep 20 2006

A short postscriptum to our last post: we referred to the French engraver of the print after van Mieris as “Mathieu Blot“, as the inscription in the lower right corner of the engraving suggests:

Now, in the literature we can’t find an engraver named Mathieu Blot, he is always referred to as Maurice Blot.

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Google Book Search: A treasure trove for the print connaisseur Friday, Sep 15 2006

You always would have loved to own a copy of Le peintre graveur (1818) by Adam Bartsch or the Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure by Claude-Henri Watelet (1792)? What about a PDF version of Notices of engravers and their works, the commencement of a dictionary which it is not intended to continue (what a lovely title!) by William Young Ottley (1831)? Now you can download scanned versions of these treasures for free, thanks to the Google Book Search project.

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