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| Home / Pop-Ups / World of Pop-Ups! | ||
| World of Pop-Ups! | ||
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| Constructions both Sacred and Profane: Serpents, Angels and Pointing Fingers in Renaissance Books with Moving Parts by: Suzanne Karr Schmidt |
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| PAGE 1 Books with moveable parts once converted the heathen, foretold the future and invigorated the memory on topics as diverse as anatomy, architecture, astrology, astronomy, cosmography, navigation, and scripture. These scraps of printed paper sewn and glued into texts as flaps and rotating volvelles first captured the imagination of the Latin-literate public in Germany and Italy in the late fifteenth century. Popularized by the growing sophistication of printing, such devices gradually spread to other nations and their vernaculars by the end of the sixteenth century. Elucidating concepts in a visually striking and concise manner, moving parts functioned as basic calculators and aide-mémoires. They increased both the autonomy of the pursuit of encyclopedic knowledge and the retention of that knowledge. Books with moving parts—and by extension, entire interactive libraries—embodied the troubled intersection of medieval artificial memory with the development of scientific method. This article will address that tension. Interactive books are difficult to evaluate in contemporaneous educational and religious terms, as their production straddled worlds of faith and geography—both the Reformation era and the Alps. Medieval moveable texts on memory derived from antique sources, but were often reworked to promote Christianity. During the Renaissance, these categories blurred further, as hermetic studies and popular divination played with classical imagery. While Protestantism redefined the didactic and the sacred in the North, in the South the Inquisition suppressed the profane, blasphemous and heretical. Moving parts became suspected of magic when they worked too well. From their instructions and disclaimers, physical signs of user interaction, and the occasional rant against the “sorcerer [and] conjurer” who produced moveable diagrams after the Reformation, one may begin to understand the complex status of these devices. A few scholars have outlined the chronology of paper engineering, but none have discussed how visual and mechanical design contributed to the way these devices were interpreted, especially in the context of the surrounding text and illustrations. The heart of this history remains concealed in the readers—or users—and their role in constructing the interactive library. |
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 Figure 1  Figure 2 |
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Yale owns about a hundred and seventy-five examples of the Renaissance and Baroque equivalent of the pop-up book. Those with dials range from the first printed volvelle in Johannes Regiomontanus's 1474 lunar calendar, to wheels calculating the flow of the heavens, casting fortunes and charting navigational courses. Luxury editions such as Petrus Apianus's 1540 Astronomicum Caesareum for Charles V included almost two dozen colored full-page, multi-layered volvelles. In the sixteenth century, more modestly designed books included flaps showing before-and-after sequences and forming three-dimensional shapes. These could have educational applications, as in architecture, geometry, and in Albrecht Dürer's 1525 treatise on measurement, with its two fold-out perspective flaps. Volumes like Pietro Bertelli's 1589 Diversarvm Nationvm Habitvs on the other hand, turned engravings of exotic costumes into peep shows. The reader could lift the skirt of Bertelli's Venetian courtesan, or raise the curtains on better-bred women's carriages. These works relate more closely to the contemporaneous trade in humorous prints with moving parts than to the scientific bent of the books with rotating diagrams. Although the use of flaps and dials in books clearly influenced each other, the current article cannot address both forms in depth. Four of these remarkable volumes with volvelles from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library will therefore suffice to illustrate the complexity of the humanist love affair with the moveable book. The thirteenth-century mystic Ramon Llull invented the first volvelle for his great calculating method, or Ars Magna, a 1302 manuscript of which survives in the British Library. The first example from the Beinecke is Llull's shorter version of his Art, the Ars Brevis, which still included the moving apparatus when it was finally published in 1514 (fig 1). When properly used, the triple layer of combinations of nine letters—which, as in the Cabala, signified the names of God—answered questions about all creation and even the future, as well as inquiries intended to settle religious disputes. Indeed, Llull based his Art on common truths held by Christianity, Judaism and Islam in the hope of streamlining mass conversions. He even attempted to launch a crusade with his Art as the central theological secret weapon. The second Beinecke book is the itinerant rhetoric professor Jacobus Publicius's Artes orandi, epistolandi, memorandi treatise. The 1482 work included the first printed artificial memory, though it depends heavily on antique sources. This form of meditation related loosely to Llull's method for remembering the truth, as both his divine and Publicius's figural alphabet could be used to construct mnemonic concepts. Llull's letters were meaningful in themselves, whereas it was the act of rotating Publicius's dial to connect characters from his visual alphabet that produced memorable patterns. His serpent-shaped pointer is the first of many diagrams that reinforced the significance of their calculations by furnishing the moving parts with their own visual connotations. Possibly due to heavy use, the Beinecke's copies of Publicius have all lost their serpent pointer. The snake pictured comes from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress (fig. 2). |
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| Suzanne Karr Schmidt I'm writing my dissertation on the art and history of the Renaissance Pop-Up Book at Yale, where I also curated a show at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in November 2003. This article discusses exactly how interactive some of the books in the show were, and was originally published in the April 2004 Yale University Library Gazette. I've spent many hours playing with the original books and prints at the Beinecke and all over Europe, after which I'd go home and make working models to figure out exactly how they were constructed. All that experience hasn't gone to waste! When I got married in January 2005, I designed letterpress invitations with a volvelle, a cut-out and a flap, and had them printed by the incredibly resourceful Green Dolphin Press. http://www.greendolphinpress.com/things/things.html Perhaps my favorite trick was getting the flap to work—the recipient had to cut off the RSVP tab to send it back, making them part of the creation process! My dissertation will include a catalogue of pop-up books and prints before 1700. I'd love suggestions from collectors whose unique interactive manuscripts or printed books or single-sheet prints I may have missed: suzanne.karrschmidt@aya.yale.edu |
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