Philobiblon

Went today to the exhibition at the Courtauld on 19th-century photography of “The Near East”, Photographic Recollections: Ancient and Islamic Monuments in the Near East 1850-1880 (which finishes on September 26).

There was something very odd about looking at many of the places that I’ve seen in person through the lenses of 150 years ago. It took me a while to work out what it was; not just the sepia, or the effect of early photographic techniques, but the fact that the spaces are all so empty. There are often a few figures arranged artistically, but otherwise these are photos of vast open spaces that today would always be packed with people: a reminder that population growth doesn’t just consist of bare statistics.

But what I found most interesting was the changing technical nature of photography over the period. Two views of the Qani-Bay Al-Mohamadi Mosque in Cairo brought this out.

The first, taken by Robertson and Beano in 1857, has a soft, almost water-colour-like quality, influenced, the caption said, by the early salt-paper negatives, but also by the tradition of Romantic drawings, with that said small group of figures arranged to give scale and local colour. One taken about a decade later, by Hammerschmidt, was done with a wet colloid negative, producing a sharp image almost like an architectural drawing, and in this there were no people and what the caption described as an “almost archaeological focus” on the monument itself.

No doubt times were changing, but the possibilities of technology were also affecting the way in which viewers of the photos could look at them: something of Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”. (Not that I’m a great fan of his; in my mass comm studies days I was severely disappointed when I got to read him at length; he was great at soundbites but lousy at sustained argument.)

These wet colloidal negatives had to be prepared on site, so Francis Frith, so the label said, had a special wicker-work dark-room wagon made for his expeditions. He wrote the locals decided it must be his harem, “full of moon-faced beauties, my wives all! – and great was the respect and consideration which this procured for me.”

I was rather taken with two pics of Palmyra, possibly taken by Joseph Bonomi, later curator of the Soane Museum. In the technique he used, the photographer had to cover the sky on the negative with black paint, to make it appear light, but this was done clumsily, and in one place the sky behind an entire row of appears dark; rather like me trying to publish a website or blog, I felt!

Natalie Zemon Davis has led me back to a book I read last when in Sancerre, France, Carnival in Romans: A People’s Uprising at Romans 1579-1580, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a scholar I suspect from the same school. (1979)

It is a beautiful illustration of her point that carnivals could be points where the lower groups rose against the higher, although in this case unsuccessfully. The upper class group in the town was already in open conflict with a group that might be described as “middling sort” when the carnival ball was held on 15 February 1580. Judge Antoine Guerin, who led the upper group, claimed that the sumptuously dressed Carnival queen, led the men to “suddenly realise the possibilities offered by the situation to pillage and plunder other of the upper-class ladies”. (p. 211.) The ladies were frightened and there was panic, which led the men to decide to act, so he said.

They ambushed the man seen as the leader of their opponents, Jean Serve, known as Paumier, who had not been involved in the incident, and it seems not been warned. He was “struck in the face with a boar spear, then … suddenly hit by two pistol shots and stabbed several times”, (p. 215.) i.e the upper-class mob murdered him in cold blood.

After that came a predictable slaughter, judicial and extra-judicial. “On 2 March a special court of justice, a temporary detail of the Parlement of Grenoble, came to Romans. It began its job of interrogation, and sentencing, to torture and death by hanging. The incarcerated Paumier supporters, whom Guerin had spared the fury of his own faction, did not have a chance. They were given a bad time of it before they died.” (p. 240)

I was writing this listening to the latest on the situation in Russia after the Beslan school siege; somehow today we seem to think these sort of things are exceptional events, which “never” happened in the past. So much for historical perspective.

On a more cheerful note, I’ve been meaning to point to a blog carnival, (perhaps the first?), over at Early Modern Notes.

More from Natalie Zemon Davis, from the famous “Women on Top” essay.

“The most popular comic example of the female’s temporary rule, however, is Phyllis riding Aristotle, a motif recurring in stories, paintings, and household objects from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries.” (p. 135-6)

Apparently, the story goes that his pupil Alexander (the Great) was admonished by the philosopher for paying excessive attention to the lady in question, one of his new subjects from India. Phyliss got her revenge in front of Alexander by flirting with the old man and getting him to get down on all fours, to be ridden like a horse, with saddle and bridle.

More on the source here; some images here and here.

Oddly enough, although I am something of a habitue of art galleries and museums I’ve never come across this before. Perhaps it wasn’t a favourite topic for all those 18th-, 19th and 20th-century (male) collectors who shaped them.

I just got around to looking her up, and she seems to have been quite a figure in literary circles. (And it seems she was the artist in my new/old volumes.)

From The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846 Vol. 2

“I like Mrs. Jameson nevertheless –I like her more. She appreciates you–and it is my turn to praise for that, now. I am to see her again to-morrow morning, when she has the goodness to promise to bring some etchings of her own, her illustrations of the new essays, for me to look at.” (p5)

“Mrs. Jameson came late to-day, at five–and was hurried and could not stay ten minutes, but showed me her etchings and very kindly left a ‘Dead St. Cecilia’ which I admired most, for its beautiful lifelessness.” (p. 9)

I also found her Shakespeare’s Heroines and a rather dense theoretical piece on her that also includes a brief biography. It claims that in the 1820s and 30s she was “one of the first women to make a reputation … as a multi-faceted professional writer”. A biography of Jane Barker, to give just one example, makes similar claim, but for a woman living a century earlier.

Mind you, being a journalist I should know how many repetitive “firsts” there are in the world, in all sorts of areas.

The letters material comes from questia.com, a reasonably cheap subscription site that shows the real possibilities of the web. It boasts the full texts, fully searchable, of a huge number of books, even if it is a sometimes uneven selection with a bias to those out of copyright. Just imagine this, but the entire contents of every new book published, and gradually most of the older ones too: an entire on-line British Library. It must come one day.

In England and American we’ve had, according to common labels, second and perhaps third wave feminism: thoroughly ethnocentric labels.

The first-wave of feminism, although we’ll never be able to recover it unless time machines are invented, was probably paleolithic, but reading any period of history the continual presence of such “waves” soon become obvious.

I’m reading Natalie Zemon Davis’s Society and Culture in Early Modern France, which contains her famous essay on “Women on Top”. (It must be the single most-cited article that I’ve come across so I thought I had to buy the book: abebooks came through again, it’s amazing how often American bookshops are cheaper, even with the postage. The price of the book was about £1!)

Writing about charivaris, “a noisy, masked demonstration to humiliate some wrongdoer in the community”, Davis says: that while in the countryside protests against second marriages were dominant, in the cities most common were those against domineering wives. She says: “there were important and little-understood changes going on in the relations between men and women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, reflected in the charivaris against henpecked husbands, in the worsening position of women in French law, and in the independent interest of some city women in Protestantism.” (Stanford Uni Press, 1979, p. 117.)

So much historical writing still seems to read the conduct books and other injunctions to women and assume they were meek and complicit in their own oppression; I very much doubt that has ever been the case!

… well temple perhaps is a better word.

I was reading ‘The Mind in the Cave’, as mentioned yesterday, because I was in southwest France, not far from the Peche-Merle caves, the best original paintings that can now be seen, since Lascaux is closed.

What the texts I’ve read on the paintings don’t emphasis is the glorious nature of the caves themselves: all the standard limestone features of stalagmites and ‘tites, and also the incredible difficulties the “artists” had in getting to the sites that they did.

One area of Pech-Merle required a kilometre-long crawl along a narrow space in which you could not even lift your head: the experience of the first person to go along that, not having any idea at all of what he or she might encounter, with only a flickering torch, hardly bears thinking about, and even for those who came after it must have been terrifying.

Then some of the finger-scratchings in the ceiling, which could only have been done by climbing a pile of enormous, apparently precariously balanced boulders. A fall would surely have resulted in a broken leg at the least, and could you have then got out? (There is apparently evidence of some scaffolding in some caves, but here the position suggests the drawer must have climbed on the rocks.)

The paintings themselves frequently show considerable artistic ability, just a single line can suggest the entire shape of a mammoth’s head, or the haunch of a deer. (I’m particularly alert to this since I utterly lack it myself – I love art, but I can’t draw.)

I would one day love to learn more about the paleolithic experience, and maybe even write about it: most of the fictional representations of which I am aware are disappointing.