Ptak Science Books

Psychological Warfare--Aerial Propaganda Leaflets and Surrender Tickets, WWII.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post #91

I was going through my small collection of 150 or so WWII aerial propaganda leaflets today, and noticing again their remarkable composition and writing style(s).  For the most part these were distributed in a combination effort between the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF), while the other major segment was done by the Supreme Headquarters of the Army Expedition Force (SHAEF) and the 8th U.S. Army.  There pieces of directed information were very persuasive, but of course they were hardly new—not even the delivery system (via aircraft) was an innovation. 

These leaflets were more and “information” service relating factual events and presented in such a way to persuade and convince whomever picked it up that their cause was at this point futile.  In just about every case in the 150 items I mentioned I could determine that all of the statements made were indeed correct and accurate.  Leaflets were dropped by the ton during the war that were pure fabrication, intended to confuse the scarce the recipient into surrender, deceiving them;  but not these. (For example, a famous use of deception in major confrontations was Operation Quicksilver and the creation of the First United States Army Group (FUSAG), a non-existent fighting enemy that was supposed to distract the Germans while real preparations were underway elsewhere for the invasion of Europe (D Day).
 
There was a distinct threat of terror in many of the leaflets in my collection, though the terror would never come from the Americans or Brits—the Russians, however, were another story. (Remember that the U.S. gets into the war at the end of 1941; the British had been fighting since 1939; and the Russians, well, they had been fighting too since 1939 [starting out without chivalry and with cold malice against the Finns], but they did lose 20 million people. The Germans had much more to fear from them than anything on earth. And rightly so.) The use of terror in propaganda is probably as old as warfare itself—for example the Mongol leader Tamerlane built a pyramid of 90,000 human heads in front of the walls of Delhi to persuade the inhabitants to just forget about fighting, and leave.   The British employed a terror tactic in the use of the Gurkas and their curved and menacing Kukri to great advantage; the Americans had the Phoenix Program in Vietnam (for the assassination of leading Viet Cong and their supporters), and so on, into the sunset.

I do not intend to try and write a thousand-word history of wartime psychological operations here—I just wanted to share some of the extreme emotions and humanity that surfaces in some of these leaflets.  The first (above), for example, translated, asks “Where are your loved ones?” (Sprint, 1945), and hammers away at the soldiers memories of home and family, and about what might be happening to that family now that the war is just about won by the Allied forces, and that the Russians were on their way to Berlin.  These family-driven, hollowing, haunting, nervous questions went, I suspect, to the very heart of anyone who picked it up.
 
The second, “Auf fremder Erde (etc.)” (Spring 1945), roughly translated, called the attention of the German soldier again to the Russians, “On German soil the Russian Deluge is Raging across the Oder toward the Heart of Germany!”  And “On foreign soil you are perishing relentlessly, without value, without influence, on this war which has long been decided!”

The third leaflet, “Deutschland R-Industrie…” (3 April 1945) informs the German soldier that the hear of the German industrial region has been punctured and given up, and that supplies to soldiers in the field would no longer occur—that the fighting man was basically adrift, lost, forgotten, unreachable by everyone except the enemy.

The last example is a 10x8 inch surrender pass that was dropped on Japanese soldiers in the early spring of 1945, and tartly signed “C-in-C [Commander in Chief] Allied Forces”.  There is a very full explanation in Japanese on the back of the ticket, which has not been translated.  It seems rather remarkable to me that this was so well designed, and so attractive, and so large, and that it was dropped from a plane on thousands of Japanese troops.  As were they all, really—just about every one of the leaflets in y house are extremely well written and designed—epistles from a plane to induce surrender to a defeated, tired, dying set of armies. 

A very comprehensive listing of propaganda leaflets is available at Psywar.org

Beautiful Title Pages 6: Losing Your Head—St. Denis and the Cephalophoric Title Page

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post #90

Robert Gaugin (1433-1501) produced this fabulous illustration for his Compendium de origine et gestis Francorum, a 180-leaf history of France, printed in Paris in the second week of 1500.  (This is actually the fourth edition of this work which first appeared in the year 1495, which would officially make it incunabula.)

St. Denis and St. Remy are pictured here standing on either side of a column supporting the fleurs-de-lys, and surrounded by the coats of arms of various French cities and provinces. 

So far as I can limitedly determine this is the first title page featuring a headless, or decapitated, human.  And that human is St. Denis of Paris, also called Dionysius, Dennis and Denys, the third century bishop of Paris who was martyred about the year 250.  It is said that after being beheaded by the Romans at the highest point in the city of Paris (now known as Montmarte, “mount of the martyr”), Denis picked up his head, held it in his hands, and walked two miles in this fashion, preaching all the way.

St. Denis however was not the only beheaded person to carry his head, nor was he anywhere near being the only saint to do so. As a matter of fact there is an entire category of saints who carried their heads following beheading, called Cephalophores.  This special class of saints

include Paul of Tarsus, Saint Ginés de la Jara, Saint Gemolo , Aphrodisius of Alexandria, (pictured below)  Nicasius of Rheims,  Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and Oswald of Northumbria, while others of this category though not saints include Lucian of Beauvais, Nectan, , Osyth, Quiteria, Winefride and Wyllow. Cephalophores also make many appearances in literature, most notably in Dante’s Inferno (8th Circle, Bertrand, pictured left) ) and in Sir Gawain and the Green Night.

But none I think appear on a title page of a book earlier than this 1500 example of St. Denis.

As a very occasional note, St. Denis is pictured here with one halo--sometimes he has two. 

Beautiful Title Pages 5: Chocolate, Morals and the Birth of the British Museum

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post #89

This lovely title page is from the book Question Moral Si El Chocolate Quebranta El Ayuno Eclesiastico, (on the Moral Question of Chocolate…), printed in Madrid in 1636, and said to be the first book on American drinks.  León Pinelo. a Spanish-colonial historian (1589 – c. 1675), born in Cordova de Tucuman, (Argentina),  and educated in the College of the Jesuits of Lima (Peru), and then leaving for Spain by 1612, where he wrote this (and other) books.   HE was a significant scholar and an accomplished bibliographer, and compiled a very extensive dissertation upon the history, uses, preparation of chocolate, as well as other drinks in general of the Americas, touching on concoctions of Indians of New Spain, Peru, Nicaragua and Guatamala. 

The title page is very dimensional, with the central figure, an Indian woman holding the scroll of the title, with a miniature coca tree in one hand and a four-leaved branch from the cocoa tree in the other. 

Leon Pinelo in no way “created” the chocolate drink, but he was the first (and extensive reporter of it and certainly remained it most extensive annotator of the drink for centuries. Columbus was aware of the drink by his fourth voyage in 1502 but said relatively little about it.  The Aztecs had been using the cocoa been for a thousand years before that.  (It has been remarked that the drink was so extraordinary and special that it was served in one-serve golden goblets that were disposed of after the chocolate was consumed). 

Perhaps the great King of Chocolate though was Sir Hans Sloane, who in addition to much else he did in his life traveled to Jamaica, where he assembled a fabulous plant collection for shipment back to England.  He also “discovered” chocolate there, improving the native presentation of the drink (which he evidently found to be nauseating) by perfecting a milky solution with it—and *that* it was brought great wealth to Sir Hans.  With that wealth Sloane continued to add to his extraordinary collection of natural artifacts, amassing one of the greatest cabinets of curiosity in England and the continent.  In addition to his own collecting and minor purchases Sloane used his chocolate money to purchase the fabulous collections of  William Courten (who, for example was an extremely wealthy Brit who financed the colonization of Barbadoes among other things before finally going bust), James Petiver, Nehemiah Grew, Leonard Plukenet, the Duchess of Beaufort, the rev. Adam Buddle, Paul Hermann, Franz Kiggelaer and Herman Boerhaave.  Death’s dance found Sloane in 1753, who left his entire collection to England, and it was this bequest that formed the opening, golden, sagacious nugget of the British Museum. 

The History of Stopping Time #1: A.M. Worthington, Ernst Mach and Doc Edgerton

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post #88
This will be the first out-of-sequence post looking at the intervals of stopped time (random or not), and how people and cultures were able to stop or save time, and how they could arrange to segment and store time over thousands of years.

The first entry is from the Scientific American from August 25, 1877 and records the experiments of A.M. Worthington. They are perhaps one of the first revelations on the quiet residence of energy in something as simple as a drop of water or mercury.  Much in the same way Robert Hooke revealed the microscopic universe to unsuspecting readers, so too did Worthington, in his way, reveal the explosive world of small, fast, and lost events. Worthington’s style is of course exceptionally restrained and free of exclamation, even while describing the first time any human has witnessed these events, like so: “…watching the changes of form of drops of various liquids falling vertically on a horizontal plane…the whole splash takes place so quickly that the eye cannot follow the changes of form…”   This report, “On Drops” follows Worthington’s own earlier effort of 1876 and 1877 “A Second Paper on The Forms Assumed by Drops of Liquids falling vertically on a Horizontal Plate” (Proceedings of the Royal Society, 174 and 177), chronicles his brilliant adventure in the newly discovered world of fast time—a world he was pretty much creating as he moved along.  (A particularly good description of the experiment as well as an image of the apparatus can be found on Martin Waugh’s lovely and arresting site—he is one of the leading modern practitioners making art in

this genre of high-speed photography:  liquid sculpture calls it.)  )   It is particularly powerful to note that the illustrations here are drawings of the phenomena of his study of splashes—drawings, not photographs.  The photos by Worthington (On A Splash from a Drop of Milk) would not appear until 1894. (An entire book is dedicated to this subject by Worthington, who published, in 1904, the wonderful A study of Splashes.)  This means, I guess, like the heroic chroniclers of snowflake forms and such that he ran many, many experiments and painstakingly observe red different parts of the splashes and recorded them by hand.  Worthington wouldn’t be able to photographically record the images of his splashes until later after the application of inventions and advances by C.V. Boys and Lord Rayleigh.  Until that time his audience would have to depend upon his tenacious observational powers—or try the experiment themselves and make their own observations, as Worthington provided all the necessary data for his experiments to be replicated, of course.
 

The next paper relates the success of Ernst Mach and P. Salcher in creating an apparatus to illuminate and photograph a bullet in flight—this was again found in the Scientific American, but for 24 September 1887 (supplement 612).  Unfortunately, their results are rendered only by a drawing, even though the half-tone was available by this point to provide a high-quality reprint of a photograph, it took Scientific American another few years to start employing that breakthrough method.  (I’m not sure why this was so.)

The results were made available in the original Austria edition of his publication from which this article is drawn.  This paper "Photographische Fixierung der durch Projektile in der Luft eingeleiten Vorgange" presented to the Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1887, was revolutionary in more ways than one, as it was really about the visualization of flow over objects, and in particular, the movement of media as a bullet traveled at supersonic speeds—and to which Mach would donate his name for the description of units of supersonic speed.  (The term was first publicized in 1929 when Swiss engineer Jakob Ackeret used Mach’s name for the first time in the description of these speeds.)

This last photo is included just because of its sheer beauty—it is far in advance and way out of the continuum for a discussion like this, but this effort, produced by Harold Edgerton, just must stay.  This is the titanic blast of ingenuity that was the intellectual successor to the earlier works listed above, but the technical advancement is just so fabulously great that the earlier scientists could simply not imagine them.  This image was as much science fiction to them as their images were to scientists considering these ideas right there at the birth of photography in 1839.) Harold “Doc” Edgerton, 1893-1990, who would form EG&G and serve MIT for many years owned this field of photography for many years—time stopped for the venerable Edgerton right after he paid for his lunch at the faculty club at MIT. Failing life with a heart attack at  87.)

For an interesting look at videos of various sorts of splashes see the North Carolina School of Science and Math HERE.

Making People Disappear Part 2-Conjurers, Blank People and Anti-Blank People. Orson Welles, Robert Heller and J.J. Thomson

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #87
Following up on an earlier post on disappearing people  (and making things disappear) is this slight abrasion on seeing things that aren’t there, and making other people see the same not-there things.  This is good and bad, depending on what seats you have in the theater and what kind of theater it is that holds these seats.  It is many times fabulous in the theater of science, where people like Democritus and Leucippus (5th century BCE Greek) proposed thinking of the world being composed of tiny, individual, non-solid and invisible elements—these elements were there, of course, because they reasoned that everything could not come from nothing, and thus they had to be so small as to seem to not exist at all.  This was the beginning of the atomic theory which would be added to and subtracted from over the next 2500 years, encountering atomists-in-extremis like John Dalton (1766-1844, with the first truly scientific/experimental/useful atomic theory) and JJ Thomson (who in 1897 actually discovered a constituent element of the invisible universe called the electron, and then on to Max Planck (who complicated things enormously and fabulously with the quantum theory in 1900, and Planck's constant  = h/2p)and on and on.

In the theater that we expect to be shown nothing and believe in it, humans have been happily deceived for thousands of years.  Our gorgeous Orson Welles, for example, still semi young when he made his B-movie masterpiece Touch of Evil, transforms himself utterly with a little make up and a whole lot of acting, disappearing himself and producing Detective Hank Quinlan in his place.  In this movie, witch is perhaps one of the greatest black-and-white, sheerly, unstoppably black-and-white, with no grey tones and contrasts sharp enough top cut your pinkies on black-and-white, the most noire of flim noires, Orson manages to hide himself in the shadows and let Det. Quinlan take his disappeared place, right there in front of you.




Another wonderful illustration of empty, waiting-to-be-filled-up humans, human tabula rasa so to speak, was employed by the "second sight" conjurer Robert Heller. He abandoned his wig and his French accent, along with his piano, to become a conjurer, and became one of the “best” of his day. Heller (born Palmer, 1826-1878) took advantage of people's lack of scientific background and inventive acuity, and their need to believe ion something mysterious and larger than themselves, in some sort of simple primordial goo that might hold together the vastly differentiated universe, to trick them into believing that he could somehow divine a manner of objects and thoughts with his razor/divination vision. 

Unfortunately, all he was doing was working with confederates and employing a slightly elaborate signaling system to communicate his so-called deep vision. (For example in this manikin image, Heller woul dbe able to signal his  confederates the number he was "divining" by touching these parts of his body as he was setting the foundation for the trick.)   It was a smart idea, a two-beer idea, that he acted on and parlayed (along with a broad theatrical stage presence)into a significant bankroll.  He had other sorts of magical helpers and automata to push his sleight show forward, but mostly, it seems, it was his ability to “force” people to know something that they couldn’t, all worked with secret alphabets and hidden associates.  It was easy and a little feeble, and it worked for years until his will just gave out. He was a local to the vicinity of my old shop in Georgetown, and it is perhaps appropriate that his magic was worked and also gave out in Washington, D.C.

To tidy things up, it was the scientists who found the things that are there but can’t be seen but couldn’t make the vast percentage of the population “see” the unseeable, while people like Heller and other magicians couldn’t find their unseen things anyway but could make people “see” their non-existent unseeables—all of which seems fairly paradoxical.

(“I see”, Patti Digh just brightly said.)(Below I've attached the opening scene from Touch of Evil--it is one continuous single take, one of the greatest opening shots in film history I think.  And old Uncle Orson was able to do all of the magic on a buck-two-eighty.)

 

 

The Weight of War--Bombing and Shelling During World War I and a Lesson in Orders of Magnitude

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #86

This indelible image was made by an anonymous photographer for the Central News Service of New York City in 1918.  The Central News Service was a photographic supply house that would send requested photos to newspapers throughout the United States for publication as illustrations for  a story.  They would've been sent rolled in a tube  with a description of the image and with the stern warning to "Watch Your Credit Line", making sure that once the newspaper had paid for the use of the photo that it also told its readers the source of the (agency) photographic.

The image is insatiable--it demands that you look at it and look at it long and hard, as it tries to give some sort of idea of the tremendous number of shells that were shot from canons by the just British against the Germans during the First World War..  There were something like one million tons of these fired against Germany; this picture represents about .001% ( of that total).  We see approximately 800 shells at two hundred pounds apiece, surrounded by a group of about 150 soldiers. 

I looked very closely at this photograph.
Of this single line of soldiers along the perimeter of the bomb cache, of the 150 of them, there are, it looks like, only five of them who have placed their hands on one of the bombs, and four of them are touching the fuse with jus their middle finger.  It is an odd picture of restraint, these soldiers paying the weapons of mass destruction the respect of room.

I think that this is an extraordinary photograph of the testament of understatement and small, small percentages--even with this photo being so enormously graphic it still gives you absolutely no idea of how much explosive material was hurled back and forth, even knowing in your mind's eye that this image represents something like SIX ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than the total tonnage of bombs used.  By the British

This difference in orders of magnitude is roughly equivalent to the difference in size between an ant and a human being, or between an amoeba and an ant, or between a human and one of the pyramids, or between the earth and the sun.  Basically, the shells in this photo meant nothing whatsoever to the total of shells used during the war.

Missing People—Pelerin, Schoen and Marey and Picturing Absent and Empty People for the Study of Perspective.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post #85

In some of the elementary thinking on perspective in the history of art and science there is a certain amount of subtraction that must occur before addition and advancement can be made—these experiments have resulted in some very unusual-singular even—images, which when viewed apart from their proper context and considering the times in which the images were made make them seem revolutionarily modern. 
    Take for example the extraordinary work of Jean Pelerin (also called Viator”) in his De artificiali perpectiva, a very rare woodcut-illustrated book printed n Nurenberg in 1509. In illustrating what he referred to as his “three point perspective” Pelerin removed much of the gothic-tradition bric-a-brac that is so heavily favored in these early books and replaced them with outlines from his rather astonishingly expressive notebooks, and replacing people, individual humans, with what may be the first “almost-entirely-absent” human forms. These roundish, ghost-like figures are just meant to hold the outlines of space, meant to function in the role of a simple comparative unit. This works quite well as an artistic technique—a solicitation tool which I think gives his reduced, “empty” humans an incredible, ethereal look unlike any other in the history of the first 60 or so years of printing.  It is difficult to imagine what the observer of these images back there in 1509 was thinking when they looked at these figures, and perhaps removed them from their textural context—it  would have been a unique visual experience for them
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Just a little while latter Erhard Schoen, in his Unnderweissung der proportzion und stellung der posssen liegent und dtehent, printed in Nurenberg (as well!) in 1538, presented another unique way of representing the human form in model for the sack f studying perspective.  He used simplified geometric form to stand in for the curvy humans, replacing them with proportional stacks of boxes which would more easily explain to the younger reader how to represent the human body n space and in proportion to other things.  Again like the Pelerin, I think that these were monumentally combative images showing humans in a radical, previously unknown way. 

Dashing into the 19th century we find another superb image of the empty man from Etienne Marey in his photographic and moving-photographic studies of motion.  This is actually a little odder, as the man in this image can be either completely empty or the convex, being completely filled up.

 

Marey would fit sensors at moving/jointed parts of the human body, affixed to a black-cloth-wearing experimental helper.  The point was to collect simply *movement* images and not necessarily-at this point at least—the parts of the body responsible for the movement.  At this time Marey was interested in the effects of motion, and used his empty man to do just that.

 

Human Power—Raw Images of the Middle Passage, the American Stain of Slavery. Wadstrom and the Slave Ship Brookes.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #84

Having just finished a short post on human-powered machines (Georg Bockler in the mid 17th century) and with Juneteenth fast approaching, I thought about another sort of human power—slaves.  I wanted to make a short post on the conditions in which Africans were taken (sold and stolen) from their home continent to North America (and later just to the United States). 

Slavery as an institution in the U.S. existed from 1619-1865, failing, ultimately, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment (the first proposed in 60 years) to the Constitution by the end of 1865. (The African slave trade—though not slavery itself—was outlawed in 1807, by a law passed jointly in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, with the  US law taking  effect on January 1, 1808.)  The amendment was ratified relatively quickly by the legislatures of the  necessary three-quarters (27) of the original 36 states in 1865—Mississippi, the last of the original states to ratify the amendment, did so in 1995, 135 years following its initial rejection. Though almost all of the states had ratified the amendment in January and February, it took until December 4th and 6th—months after the crushing failure of the Confederacy—for North Carolina and Georgia to vote for it.  (The remaining 9 states voted for the amendment as follows:  Oregon California and Florida in 1865; Iowa and New Jersey (which had initially rejected the matter in 1865) in 1866;   Texas in 1870; Delaware, the First State, in 1901; Kentucky in 1976; and Mississippi, somehow, in 1995
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The Emancipation Proclamation was issued September 22, 1862, with a three-month long pillow until it took effect on  January 1, 1863 .  Juneteenth refers to the freeing of the slaves in Texas (at Galveston) with the reading of General Order No. 3, on 19th June 1865.  Texas was the last refuge of Southern Slavery, and it all ended on that day. 

The famous image above (of the British slave ship Brooke)  is taken from An Essay on Colonization, particularly applied to the Western Coast of Africa….by Carl Bernhard Wadstrom, printed in London in 1794.  Wadstrom (1746-1799) was devoted abolitionist and Swedenbourgian who planned, advocated and practiced (via his relationship with the Nordenskold brothers and the Philanthhropic Society a working agricultural colony on the West coast of Africa) the end of slavery and the return of removed slaves to Africa.

The images pretty much speak for themselves. Though it should be pointed out that this engraving depicts about 480 slaves packed into the modified hold of the Brooke; in reality the Brooke carried between 500 and 650 slaves to America (meaning the conditions were even more crowded than depicted here), losing on average about 125 people to the insufferable and depraved conditions (dysentery, heat, malnutrition, lack of water, scurvy and so on).

Human Powered Machines--Bockler's Theatrum Novum, 1661

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post #83

This post started with this image from Georg Andreas Bockler Theatrum Machinarum Novum (published by Paulus Fuersen and printed by Christoff Gerhard in Nurenberg in 1661) showing to what our eyes in 2008 see as an extraordinary device to power a fan for a dining table. The gears running what seems to be an escapement-like (clock) device are enormous, and the weight for the weight-driven power source must have been considerable. The result of all of this is that the housing for machine powering the fan necessitate lowering the ceiling in the dining chamber to less than five feet (as there is just enough headroom to get into and out of seat, with the bulk of the cubic space of the room dedicated to the cooling device, which ran like a pendulum, and which also demanded what looks to be like a 10-foot x 1 foot long opening in the ceiling. But if it was a hot humid day in Nurnberg in the summer of 1666, then that fan would feel pretty bloody good to you, as there would have been nothing like it in the city (save for a servant fanning you from not such a discrete distance).

 Bockler as it turns out was an extraordinary talent and very gifted thinker and engineer, designing all manner of instruments and machines over a wide range of fields. His principle interest though was hydraulics, as exhibited in his very popular Architectura Curiosa Nova (1664), which was a practical application of his knowledge of hydrodynamics and mechanics (in general), showing how to construct fountains for the garden and for public city life.

Looking deeper into the beautifully illustrated Theatrum Machinarum though I was struck by how many of these big machines were powered by humans. And as it turns out Bockler was responding with smaller, more elegant human-power designs because of a problem in supply for the other power sources. The problem with running a furnace to power these machines was the fuel—wood and coal had become problematic on the continent and in Britain in the mid-17^th century. The trees that would’ve supplied the wood for the furnaces were disappearing with the rapidly depleted forests. Coal was even a problem with the relatively shallow veins of the deposit giving out. In the meantime of the stagnant power supplies Bockler offered his readers (and parishioners) designs for machines that if all else failed could be powered by humans. Humans on treadmills, humans turning lathes, and so on.

I’ve included this last part for a horse-driven machine because of the very small window of exposure for the horse to the wheel it would turn. It looks as though it was elegant but I haven’t much of an idea if horses could get used to moving their hind legs without moving their front legs.

You can see the entire Theatrum courtesy of Cornell University right HERE.

 

 

The Big Cycle—the Beginning and the End of the World and the Weight of All Things, Depicted 1445-1550.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #82

(1)  The End

I came to this post through the interest in an image that shows life as we know it in its very last teetering stage, at the crystalline moment just before the bullet hits the bone, just before the wave breaks, just before the shade swallows the light.  The image is incredible, seemingly far beyond the reach of the 15th century, far above its naïve absolutism, showing a tower of water, the oceans risen from their depths and towering over the mountains, just before the cascade and inundation begins.  It is by Antoine Vérard  and was published in 1493/4 in André Bocard’s (b. 1453)   L'Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir .  Those little poking-out bits are indeed fish, the sign of life and the aymbol for Christ in that unimaginable column of Earth-killing water, one of the Christian indicators that the Judgment Day was near.  Actually I think that we’ve moved far beyond Judgment at this point, and that the print shows the watery effectuator of the warnings and promises heaped down on the readers of Revelations and Apocalypse, among other things. 

(2)  The Beginning

I love this painting by Bosch showing the creation of the universe , mainly because we associate the hyper-imaginative old man (Bosch, not God) with dripping and dire images of the other end of the space time continuum.  This view of the cosmos is quiet and benign—Bosch to me seldom *waits* for things to happen, as in this painting, which seems all about anticipation and possibility.  The canvas is empty, quite unlike the very full, kinetic, no-time-for-reflective-action images that we usually associate with this painter.

(3) The Beginning of the Beginning and the Beginning of the End.

The Bible is a relatively long book, but the space between creation and the (quick?) ultra-final desiccation of Paradise happens in such short word-distance from one another that you can barely get comfortable in your chair before the race to the end begins.  (My wife Patti Digh says that this action is so quick because we need forward action in the telling of the story—we need the wolf to make Little Red Riding Hood more interesting.) 
The painting, Creation of the World and Expulsion from Paradise, is by Giovanni di Paolo, and was completed in 1445.
     
The expulsion part was particularly gloomy for all non-human things because, as I am told, it is from this point (day?) forward that animals no longer live in harmony with one another, and that their vast majority is made to eat each other, consuming each other for energy sources, in a vast, incredible orgy of killing and death.  That’s quite a price to pay for human insouciance.  It seems to me that if you added up the weight of everything on earth that killed other living things for energy versus the weight of everything else gaining energy from the sun or chemically or whatever, that the later would compose only a fraction of the killers’ weight.  (As Gus McRae says in Lonesome Dove,”the Earth is just one big boneyard”. 

One interesting part of this painting is di Paolo’s depiction of the nine spheres of creation, which he depicts in eight.  (The earth at center, followed by the elements   water, air, and fire, then the moon and planets, then the fixed stars with signs of the zodiac, the primum mobile and finally the undefined Empyrean heaven, the place where God and all of its components sit.  Perhaps di Apolo felt that he could not contain the Empyrean, and so left it unbounded.

(4) The Cycle of Cosmic Life

This interesting woodcut by Antoine Verard in his French Bible of 1517 shows Adam and Eve in the Garden in the opening moments of Genesis, its incubating sphere seemingly at the root of a great tree, which, for all  of its great beauty, seems backwards. Perhaps the message would be different if you put the Garden at the top of the tree, the tree of life; having the garden and its quick demise (where did the garden “go”, anyway?) seems to symbolize death at the root of all that followed the expulsion, as great trees all wind up lichen-bait at some point.

(5)  The Cycle of Life on Earth

This wonderful woodcut from Jean de la Garde's  The Heart of Philosophy (1504)—an amalgam and witches brew of hermetic and astrological texts and conjectures—and is perhaps the most brilliant of the sixty-two woodcut illustrations in the wide-ranging, over-reaching book.  The complex message here shows the influences of the earth and cosmos on the life of humans, the astrological signs and symbols of the seasons and etc. all bearing down very hard on the flower in the lap of the woman at the center of it all. It just seems so odd that there should be so much forebearance and such an extraordinary concentration of effort to be brought to bear against a solitary womb.  With all of that reigning down on us, I wonder how it is that we are expected to breathe?