Last year I came across some of the book plates from Khunrath’s occult work Ampitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Hamburg, 1595), or “The Amphitheater of Eternal Knowledge,” and was floored by their complexity and beauty. Remarkably, only three copies of the first edition of this work are known to exist. The University of Wisconsin Library has been good enough to scan …
Author Archives: Benjamin Breen
American Monsters: Images of Brazilian Nature from Early Modern Europe
“The most disgusting and nauseating thing which man ever saw.” -Spanish chronicler Andres Bernaldez on Christopher Columbus’ first impression of Caribbean iguanas, 1513. IN HIS BOOK Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Harvard literature professor Stephen Greenblatt argues that “the production of a sense of the marvelous in the New World is at the very …
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The Art of Fooling the Eye
PARRHASIUS, it is said, entered into a pictorial contest with Zeuxis, who represented some grapes, painted so naturally that the birds flew towards the spot where the picture was exhibited. Parrhasius, on the other hand, exhibited a curtain, drawn with such singular truthfulness, that Zeuxis, elated with the judgment which had been passed upon his …
A Renaissance Merchant’s Life in Clothing
I’ve just finished reading Ulinka Rublack’s Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2010) and came away from it with a newfound appreciation for how truly odd early modern clothing was — and how important these clothes were in people’s daily lives. Rublack, a Cambridge history professor, is very shrewd in noting that obsolete sartorial choices like …
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Le Monde Aquatique
The images below are hand-colored details from two lavishly illustrated atlases of the world’s oceans produced by the workshops of Pieter Goos (d. 1670) and Johannes van Keulen (1654-1715). Goos’ L’Atlas de la Mer, ou Monde Aquaticque (“Atlas of the Sea, or the Watery World”) the title page of which is visible at left, was published in Amsterdam in 1670. …
Carnivalesque 74
What follows are my selections for this month’s Early Modern Carnivalesque, the seventy-fourth in an ongoing series of blog post compendia, or “carnivals,” curated by the web’s doyenne of early modern history, Sharon Howard. Thanks to Sharon and to all the authors of the posts cited below for making such rich stores of information freely …
The Key of Hell: an Eighteenth-Century Sorcery Manual [Updated]
Astrological talisman from an 1801 grimoire. I found these amazing illustrations on Wellcome Images, a useful online database devoted to images related to the history of medicine from ancient times to the present. It is a small part of the larger Wellcome Trust archives. According to the image captions supplied by the Wellcome, all of the images below come …
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The World’s Tallest Statues
As to boldness of design, the examples are innumerable; for we see designed, statues of enormous bulk, known as colossal statues and equal to towers in size.– Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE), Natural History, Book 34, Chapter 9. Wikipedia has its critics (some justified, some not), but I personally love the odd ways that it organizes …
"For they are very expert and skillful in Diabolical Conjurations": Lionel Wafer in Central America, 1681
“I sat awhile, cringing upon my Hams among the Indians, after their Fashion, painted as they were, and all naked but only about the Waist, and with my Nose-piece… hanging over my mouth. … ‘Twas the better part of an Hour before one of the Crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cried out, Here’s our …
History on the Web Roundup, Mk. 1
One of the things I’ve enjoyed about starting this site is that its made me aware of many other blogs devoted to history and visual culture. Popular sites like BibliOdyssey and 50 Watts (née A Journey Round My Skull) will probably be familiar to many of my readers, but others are less well known. With …
Benjamin Breen 