Reviews and News:
How a British bookbinder helped save some of Florence’s rarest books: “Fifty years ago, on Friday, Nov. 4, 1966, Italy’s Arno River breached its retaining walls and flooded the city of Florence. That day, hundreds of works of art were damaged by a mixture of water, sewage, fuel oil and silt. Cimabue’s panel painting ‘The Crucifixion’— one of the seminal works of the early Renaissance — was submerged in 13 feet of water inside the church of Santa Croce. As we learn from Waters Rising, approximately one-third of the collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze — 1.3 million items — was also submerged that day, including ‘the exceedingly important Magliabechi and Palatine rare-book collections.’ Three weeks afterward, Peter Waters, then only 36 but arguably the most gifted bookbinder of his generation, received a phone call from Howard Nixon of the British Museum. The next day, Nov. 25, Waters — along with fellow binders Anthony Cains and Dorothy Cumpstey — was on a plane to Italy.”
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Kickstarter’s million-dollar Bible.
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Ron Rash’s narrative verse: “The Appalachian settings and characters, the sharp language and crisp images that are the hallmarks of his fiction are all here, in poems about historical figures like the naturalists William Bartram and Horace Kephart (who is also a character in Serena); Civil War conflicts and clan feuds; the origins of place and plant names; and exile—from ancestral countries, from family farms, from the mountains. Some of the overlap with his fiction is more direct: One of the new poems, ‘First Memory,’ makes a cameo appearance in the diary of a main character from Above the Waterfall. (That character, like Rash, is an admirer of Gerard Manley Hopkins.) ‘Carolina Parakeet’ covers subject matter integral to his novel The Cove. ‘Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out’ is a poetic version of a short story with the same title.”
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The plain, powerful paintings of les frères Le Nain: “By the time Antoine and Louis Le Nain died, both in 1648, the three brothers had earned a name for themselves and for their plain yet deeply poetic studies of French peasant life. Over the centuries since, connoisseurs have cherished their works in museums from the Louvre, to the Victoria and Albert in London, to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And now a beautifully, even tenderly curated recent exhibition in the Piano Pavilion of the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, has shown visitors how much broader the brothers’ range was. In addition to peasant life—itself a more differentiated subject than had been acknowledged—the sixty-five works on display also reveal the Le Nains’ excellence in religious work and genre scenes, mythological allegory, and portraits.”
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The first total war: “Thus, in a development foreshadowed by the mass mobilizations of revolutionary France, armies of both the Union and the Confederacy were motivated by nationalist ideology—and both sides underestimated the fervor of their opponents. They also failed at first to appreciate the savage cost that would be exacted by the combination of mass ideological armies with the technology of the Industrial Revolution. The men most responsible for the Union victory—Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman—succeeded because they came to understand how progress had changed the nature of war.”
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Timekeeping in books: “Some volumes are exceptionally beautiful, such as German cartographer Sebastian Münster’s 1533 Horologiographia, the first book devoted to sundials, with woodcuts attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger. Meanwhile, French engineer Salomon de Caus’s 1624 La pratique et demonstration des horloges solaires has embedded pop-ups to make the workings of its sundials easier to replicate.”
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Why English changes.
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The forgotten Dutch artist two centuries ahead of his time.
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Essay of the Day:
Windows are replacing walls in modern architecture. Should they? Edwin Heathcote argues that the move is motivated by a desire to live in a world of freedom and transparency without structure. But walls of glass can become a hellish prison, too:
“A view is not a one-way privilege. Sure, you can have a panoramic window, but there will also be a view back in. It is a condition highlighted in recent complaints by residents in the Neo Bankside apartments that visitors to neighbouring Tate Modern’s new viewing gallery were using it to look right into their apartments. There have been letters.
“Sir Nicholas Serota, the outgoing director of the Tate, probably didn’t help when he suggested the residents put up net curtains. Yet the flippant (and also rather brilliant) comment did highlight a contemporary condition, and a facet of modern architecture, that is little discussed but which is destined to become a real problem as the skylines of global cities compete to out-glass-tower each other with ever denser developments.
“The difficulty stems from a confusion at the heart of contemporary architecture — that is, the difference between a window and a wall. In the first decades of the 20th century the Modernists dreamt of transparency, of the melting away of structure. Already in the mid-19th century a fissure opened up between a new glass architecture and the traditional blocks of the city.
“You can see the conflict between the two at St Pancras Station in London (1868), in the way William Henry Barlow’s magnificent glass shed comes crashing in to the city only to be blocked by George Gilbert Scott’s gothic brick castle of the Midland Grand hotel. The new ideal was represented by the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park (1851), a building through which Joseph Paxton, an engineer, challenged the profession of architecture with a new conception of containing space.
“It represented a fundamental rethinking of architecture. It was not walls with windows, but walls that were all window. The Crystal Palace did not contain a series of spaces or rooms — it was one great open plan, a representation of the world of trade and manufacture just as Kew’s Palm House (1848) was a container of an exotic other world. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk called the idea the ‘Bubble’, one enduring meme that is now resurfacing from designs for Google’s new Mountain View HQ to Elon Musk’s plans for a base on Mars.”
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Image of the Day: Fish
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Poem: Bill Coyle, “Respiratory”
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