 |
|||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
|||||||||
 |
 |
 |
| Home / Pop-Ups / World of Pop-Ups! | ||
| World of Pop-Ups! | ||
 |
| Constructions both Sacred and Profane: Serpents, Angels and Pointing Fingers in Renaissance Books with Moving Parts by: Suzanne Karr Schmidt |
||
 |
||
| PAGE 2 Similarly in the third example, the 1546 Looßbuch, by the German cleric or cynic Paul Pambst, an Angel and the Christ Child, (as recto and verso of a double-sided volvelle), indicated questions about the future, and the torturous route through the book to the answers. This lottery book emerged from a long history of popular fortune-telling dice games, and was complete with a set of standard questions and a wide array of answers at the back. Although Pambst’s version still employs dice to assure random fortunes, the frayed edges of the Angel disc reveal the frequent usage of the volvelle in selecting the initial question. The harsh criticism of his book may have reflected protest toward its intended audience as well as toward its contents. Unlike the academic works mentioned above, Pambst’s dedication to the Queen of the Romans, Hungary and Bohemia made it clear that he penned his entertaining verses for both men and women (figs. 3, 4). The Neapolitan polymath and author of Natural Magic, Giambattista della Porta, composed the final Beinecke example, which was again explicitly geared toward scholars. Della Porta further mechanized the study of enigmatic characters in his handbook on cryptography from 1563, De fvrtivis literarvm notis vvlgo, often retitled as De occvltis literarvm notis after 1593. The Beinecke’s 1593 volume in particular displays extensive user notation in the sections explaining the purpose of the volvelles. These editions became increasingly interactive showcases for della Porta’s three moveable dials, which were effectively "secret decoder rings." Significantly, woodcuts on the dials of God’s own pointing finger—surrounded by cryptic symbols—assembled and deciphered the code combinations (fig. 5). Artificial Memory and Natural Magic The Philosophers of ancient Rome preconditioned the attitude toward moveable parts during the Renaissance. The most famous Roman rhetoric treatise, Ad Herennium, was based on Greek sources and defined artificial memory as a vivid inner writing used to memorize arguments: "The artificial memory is established from places and images." The user thus imagined a physical location filled systematically with mnemonic images signifying words and their place within larger concepts and speeches. Cicero’s seeming connection of this rhetorical technique with the virtue of Prudence produced a spate of moral associations during the Middle Ages. He did not actually write the Ad Herennium, but the rhetoric treatise Cicero did author endorsed the ‘firm perception in the soul’ of both things and words. It firmly established memory as one of Prudence’s three cardinal virtues. Medieval readers conflated the Ad Herennium with Cicero and assumed that the artificial memory was thus an acceptable means of learning good from evil. Two variations adapted the artificial memory to strengthen the Christian Faith in the thirteenth century: the meditative immobile memory of the Dominicans, and the rotating Art of the mystic Ramon Llull. Llull’s volvelle conflated meditational rotation with the classical idea of location. While the discs literally housed the signs (in this case, letters) for the mnemonic images, they no longer revolved in the mind, but on paper. Llull thus became revolutionary by reintroducing movement into artificial memory. With it, he produced a tool that freed the intellect from remembering how to remember. Each of the nine letters on the three dials (one of which was immoveable) represented a concept of divine goodness, and by using them interchangeably as interrogatives and statements, the Artist could answer any query about all creation. The volvelle’s user became capable of asking questions and discovering new knowledge rather than merely reiterating the old. By the sixteenth century, artificial memory and its Llullian apparatus had become increasingly distrusted due to their conflicting religious and classical roots. While Llull’s twelfth-century Art offered a basic mechanism for scientific inquiry, the dubious reputation of Giambattista della Porta’s experimental Natural Magic (in editions in 1558 and 1589) epitomizes the new associations of such an inquisitive method with the hermetic tradition. Despite their temporal distance, Llull and della Porta’s texts provide a framework for understanding the scope of the moveable book’s Renaissance audience. Indeed, their work received some of the most extreme reactions to interactive books. Although Llull was not taken seriously in his day, his influence was tremendous in many fields, especially the art of memory. By the sixteenth century, Llull’s Art was considered a Christian form of the Cabala, because the Neoplatonist Pico della Mirandola believed that practice employed a similar type of "ars combinadi done with revolving alphabets." In this respect it acted as an occult precursor for della Porta and the members of his Accademia Secretorum Naturae. While della Porta’s popular Natural Magic contains recipes for scientific experiments rather than moving elements, the book’s stress on interactive self-sufficiency is vital to their discussion. In a natural extension of his bestselling work, della Porta’s book on cryptography allows readers a form of hands-on experimentation with all its elements already present in the moveable dials. Potential Magicians who could not afford a laboratory or the leisure of the members of the Accademia, or Otiosi, might still be able to afford this handbook, and could heighten their investment in the scholarly exercise by cutting out and mounting the dials themselves. |
|
 Figure 3  Figure 4  Figure 5 |
| << BACK NEXT >> | ||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Home | | | What's New | | | Gift Shop | | | Explore Pop-ups | | | About Robert | | | Books | | | Appearances | | | Contests | | | CCRFund | | | FAQ | | | Contact | | | Subscribe! | | | Site Map |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
| © 2010 robertsabuda.com, Inc. or its affiliates | ||||||||||||||||||||||||