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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 3 Della Porta and Llull influenced Renaissance thought in promoting individual study. Their works however, employed visual religious symbolism differently, though both meant to invoke the importance of the device itself as a portal to higher knowledge. Both authors demanded skill and strict attention to detail in carrying out their respective questions and experiments. Llull's triple-decker volvelle with its nine symbolic letters was a purer, almost Neoplatonic form of della Porta's dials with their disembodied hand of God indices. Although equally sincere in their respective searches for divine and empirical truths, both these scholars were censured by higher authorities: della Porta through his brief and relatively painless encounter with the Inquisition, and Llull in a dream or vision: [There was] a story told in the contemporary life of Llull of the alarming vision that he had in a Dominican church in which a voice told him that only in the Order of Preachers would he find salvation. But to enter the Order of Preachers he must abandon his Art. He made the bold decision to save his Art at the possible expense of his soul, ‘choosing rather that he himself should be damned than that his art, whereby many might be saved, should be lost.' This anecdote illustrates Llull's ironic inability to inhabit the clerical world, for as one scholar put it, "the search for truth by means of the Llullian art is always a search for congruence with God." He even dedicated his Ars Brevis to the Lord. A perfectionist, Llull repeatedly mentioned the diligence required to employ his art properly, for the path to ideal knowledge as a true Artist was dependent on the abilities and qualities of the individual. The Artist had to know the fluid categories of meaning behind the nine letters by heart. Since A was reserved for God, Llull used B through K, and omitted J, which was not present in Latin, Hebrew or Greek. The letters allowed the Artist to ask the appropriate questions and construct logical arguments around them, without which one could not use the Art properly. These questions centered around a progression of nine increasingly divine subjects, from earthly power to mankind, to Heaven, to Angels and finally, to God. Llull's inclusion of this alphabet and explanation of the workings of his Art in every text kept his method remarkably consistent. Della Porta never envisioned turning himself in to the Catholic Church. Instead, the writer was denounced in the late 1570s by "some fellow Neapolitans who were scandalized by his growing reputation for magic and by the titles of Indovino and Mago bestowed on him by the populace." Della Porta had admittedly complicated his scientific persona by using his experiments to become "adept at casting horoscopes," and "had, in addition, a pretty knack for prophecy." "When they proved true, as they quite often did, no one doubted that it was due to the occult knowledge he had acquired in his workroom." The Inquisition consequently required an explanation of the reports of witches' salves and necromantic arts della Porta had dismissed as spurious in his Natural Magic in 1558. The Inquisition assumed that, as membership in the Otiosi famously required the empirical proof of new scientific theories, della Porta had actually tested his recipes. Della Porta would counter these accusations of conjuring and witches's brews once again in the preface to his 1589 edition, where he lambasted "a certain Frenchman," Jean Bodin and his Daemonomania. A German translation of this same text later inserted references to questionable German tomes of this ilk, including the Pambst lottery book. |
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 Figure 6  Figure 7  Figure 8 |
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Publicius's Garden of Memory While never so popular or censured as Natural Magic, Jacobus Publicius's artificial memory understandably reappeared in later works, for the very principle it taught was the classical form of learning through repetition. When della Porta reproduced Publicius's visual alphabet in his own text on memory over a century later he was the third author to do so. The physical rotation of the snake volvelle helped the user "ruminate" on the appropriate concepts linked through the letter combinations it indicated, a technique also employed in prayer as well as rhetoric throughout the Middle Ages. Believers used this aid to reenact the trials of their Lord Jesus Christ, and to remember the opposing concepts of Heaven and Hell, Virtues and Vices. Della Porta probably knew the Dominican Johannes Romberch's "Abbey Memory System" from 1533 as well as the earlier work by Publicius, whose text and illustrations it copied. Romberch's series of rosaries and chalices punctuated with a blessing hand to mark every fifth place may even have influenced della Porta's divine pointing fingers (fig. 6). They are a fittingly sanctified replacement for the "golden hand" used to break up the succession of memorable objects in the original Ad Herennium Roman treatise. Although Publicius did not refer so exclusively to Catholicism in his own alphabet, a visual biblical narrative appears in his more extensively illustrated second edition. Publicius's implicit religious symbolism makes sense in context, especially as the second edition appeared in 1485, only three years after the first one. In contrast, the changes made to the visual layout of Llull's work between 1302 and 1514 are illogical. Llull's contributions to the more abstract classical branch of artificial memory make it most uncharacteristic that his 1514 printed Ars Brevis opens with the Saints Peter and Paul holding the Veronica on the title page. His tabulis generalis, which consisted of lists of pure letter combinations, has been framed between nondescript Gothic columns. These replicate the format of medieval canon tables that would normally have compared the texts of the gospels. Llull would have argued that this redundant symbolism was already inherent in his nine letter-names of God. Both he and Publicius approved of the repetitive nature of meditating upon a subject, but rejected the explicit sequence of purely religious items seen later in the "Abbey Memory System": The other kind of memory, [Llull] continues, is artificial memory and this is of two kinds. One consists in the use of medicines and plasters for the improvement of memory, and these he does not recommend. The other kind consists in frequently going over in memory what one wishes to retain, like an ox chewing the cud. For, as it is said in the book of memory and reminiscence by frequent repetition (memory) is firmly confirmed. With this quote, Llull repeats "a trope that became a monastic commonplace," which Augustine had called venter animi, "the stomach of the mind (Confessions 10.14.21)." Publicius's illustrations may refer to this animal-stomach analogy. A leaf in every edition of the Artes orandi represented a grid of twenty-five animals which take part in this memory art as a compound locus for memorization. Publicius suggested inventing a hundred of these creatures to correspond with the alphabet, even to the confusing extent of deforming five of them into each of the letters. The ox and the fish recurred separately in his alphabet in roundel form, along with the household items posed as letters, and a contorted human U. This illustrated alphabet of forty-one letters was comprised of three images per vowel and two per consonant. The images also included a screw press (U), horseshoe (C), crown (M), bell (O) and crab (E), while the ox head and fish represented the shapes of D and I (fig. 7). Versions of the excerpted final chapter on memory, known as the Ars Memorativa were published with entirely moveable alphabets in Cologne sometime after the legitimate 1482 version, and in Paris between 1484-90. These editions boasted archaic reverse woodcut copies of the alphabet roundels, which were mounted on grids as a series of makeshift volvelles. These letter-tools were also arranged alphabetically, allowing the user to literally spin them around during their rumination (fig. 8). Such copyist efforts may have been counterproductive to the desired mental process, as several of the volvelles resembled different letters in reverse. In particular, the hoe and pickaxe meant to form the letter L instead looked like a J. Unlike the snake volvelle, these letters merely spun around themselves, and did not allow for the linking of greater concepts. Indeed, once the Cologne and Paris versions expanded the function of the snake volvelle to encompass the entire alphabet, they dispensed with the original diagram entirely. |
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