Medieval Bodies

Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages , by Jack Hartnell, uses the body as a narrative shape to fill up with all sorts of historic details. It’s my favorite type of read, and on my Kindle, I can quickly look up even more information.

For example, in a chapter on bones, Mr Hartnell writes about the tympanum of the Last Judgement at the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques, France. He gives a photo, but I wanted more detail, so Googled it and found a hi-res image…..and this:

“Particularly interesting are carvings of the "curieux" (the curious ones), forerunners of the World War II-era cartoon image known as Kilroy, who peek over the edges of the tympanum. The tympanum was inspired by illuminated manuscripts and would have been fully colored, small traces of the color survive today”. on Wikipedia.

“Curieux?” Really? Never heard of it, but ….

I’ve drawn a red circle on the top photo, showing the location, but it looks like there are several of these peeking out from the edge. If the tympanum was inspired by medieval manuscripts, this fellow was inspired by the marginalia.

Then we have two tombs. The first is of John the Fearless, supported by small carved alabaster mourners:

At some point the tomb was being repaired, & the mourners traveled to some museums :

The second is the tomb of Alice Chaucer, which has 2 carved bodies - one on top and one hidden at the bottom:

You’d have to kneel down to see the second one:

Mr. Hartnell mentions Mondino dei Liuzzi, who wrote a Medieval book on dissection…..

..…titled Anathomia Corporis Humani, which was the inspiration for one of my tablets:

In the chapter on skin, Hartnell discusses parchment. We think of parchment as ancient - medieval - but the United kingdom was recording their laws on parchment until 2017:

This little bead (Below) has a kissing couple on one side, and a skeleton on the other (the banner held by the skeleton reads “recognise in me what you will soon be”). I couldn’t find another image of this ivory bead anywhere, so I used my phone to take a photo of the image on my Kindle:

The chapter on hands is great. There’s the Guidonian hands “ a medieval mnemonic device designed to assist singers sight-sing (the sung realization of prima vista, or sight-reading). Their development is generally credited to an 11th centruy Italian music theorist named Guido of Arezzo, though the graphic use of the hand as a musical guide long predates the development of his technique” More at https://blogthehum.com/2016/04/13/sight-makes-sound-the-wonder-of-guidonian-hands/

But then he writes about the Venerable Bede and his numerating digits. Bede developed a ”highly elaborate system of finger-counting and gestural sign-language for representing numbers and facilitating conceptual reasoning” I don’t pretend to understand how this worked, but you can read a full explanation at https://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/talk-to-the-hand-finger-counting-and-hand-diagrams-in-the-middle-ages/

https://www.bl.uk/medieval-english-french-manuscripts/articles/medieval-science-and-mathematics gives us this llustration of hands labelled with figures on the fingers to calculate the date of Easter and perform mathematical calculations :

more hand calculations…..

That’s all for now. More neext week!

even stranger maps....

(Below) The Waldseemüller map (by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller), published in 1507, is the first map to use the name "America".

There is only one known copy, which is called America’s birth certificate, even though America is written on South America, not the USA. Amerigo Vespucci is pictured in the border.

I started playing around with this ‘birth certificate’ . I kept the frame but used a very exaggerated world map, inflating the USA while pushing other countries away.

I copied the various zephers from the edges and posotioned them around our borders. Now they blow (hot air?) at our neighbors. While I love the xenophobic zephers, this one isn’t going anywhere…..

This map of Goa, in India, is so inviting. I love the roads, outlined in RED. Let’s just take a quick look here…(I said to myself)

Occupied since prehistoric times, there are carvings in the stone just outside the city….

This 16th century print shows the busy city after the Portugese had taken over…

I had several lovely days blending red-outlined-roads with ancient petroglyphs, fussing with costumes and compostion and totally avoiding our ghastly reality. Eventually I stopped and realized just how far off-track this was…….but it was such fun.

Well then……looking at more maps from the 1600s, North America really does loom large, doesn’t it?

I can’t tell you what lack of cartographic skill led to these obese continents, but the hulking images seemed to reflect our national MAGA insanity…

So I made another attempt at an inflated America, pushing the other countries away.

Then I relegated the other countries to sidebars - just umimportant decorative framework for us. (Why is there a huge island off the west coast? Because some early maps had California as an island. Which I should NOT have copied here, but that’s really one of the lesser mistakes).

I was also replacing the ancient Roman gods with ancient cartographers…

…and then, abandoning all sense, lurching ahead in my Photoshop wilderness, I replaced the torn crumbling paper of the country with sagging, shriveled old skin, puckered and scarred and GREEN.

This may actually be worse than the presidential debate.

Fortunately, I didn’t show that one to my critique group. I showed them the one below, with the keyhole tablets. There was a noticable lack of enthusiasm, apparent even on Zoom. One of the artists said “Diane, why don’t you forget the whole framework, and just use the center?”

Not a bad idea…..print out a simple outline image of the country as old paper, then sew on the keyholes.

In the meantime, I’ve started sewing the home tablets on the mappa mundi image. You’ll see that next week.

Stay safe,