Dentata

The top illustration is from Canis carchariæ by Niels Stensen or Nicolaus Steno in 1667 from the Danish National Library.

The other two images were not sourced.

Alonso de Ovalle's Chile

Alonso de Ovalle (1603-1651) from Chile joined the Jesuit order of priests as a young man and studied theology and philosophy and did missionary work among the native indians. He was sent to Europe to obtain resources and monks to continue the missionary work. When he got there he was astonished to find that most people in Europe had not heard of his beloved Chile.





So de Ovalle wrote an historical 'encyclopedic' book about his country. Histórica Relación del Reyno de Chile was first published in latin in 1646 and translated into Italian the following year. Although he consulted widely for factual material, the majority of the work consists of his describing all that he knew in relation to the geography and minerals and natives and customs and flora/fauna and the colonial military powers of Chile.

I didn't note any information about the illustrations. I'm not even sure if they were issued when the book was first published. The imagery is striking (when it's not obviously filched from traditional renaissance sources) and not overly positive in its representation of the indians. The Christ on a tree motif is surreal and I wonder if it's an original for this work, if anyone knows? [The titles of each illustration are in the image URLs]

• Histórica Relación del Reyno de Chile is presented online by Memoria Chilena - the first 2 links in the final paragraph on this page contain the major illustrations (translation). The site itself is quite worthy of a wander; they have a modest collection of books and images posted, and I will surely return there to check it out further.
• A short review from the José Durand library at Notre Dame University.

[The image below is not from de Ovalle - it comes from the 'Dutch in Chile' section of Memoria Chilena]

Sketch Coping

Looks like it's sketchbook day here. I wasn't looking for it but it did come up on the radar and I don't think it has been posted around at all or much. There are about 15 journals with no more than 10 pages in each. It is an ajaxy interface that works pretty well. He also has art. Edgy eclectic and unsual. It made me pause. So it has been successful for this perusing visual commuter.

© John Copeland - you'll find the sketchbooks under 'journals' so perhaps they're journals and not sketchbooks. But a journal is a book right? So it's within the purview of BibliOdyssey.

"I keep small visual journals, which serve as a place to document my surroundings and work out pictures on a small scale. I take depictions of scenes, objects, and people around me, and recast them as visual metaphors, within larger works that talk about psychology, communication, struggle, and isolation. Text is often built up as texture and as a subtext to the imagery. Figures in urban settings, still lives of discarded objects, advertising, windows and trees are common subjects."

Dans le Jardin

After completion in 1668, the gardens at the Palace of Versailles (by André Le Nôtre) became renowned throughout Europe. Models of the gardens together with french gardeners and french landscape architects became popular with the elite across the continent. It was into this atmosphere that famous landscape designer/gardeners Michel Le Bouteux and André Le Nôtre released their Plans et Dessins Nouveaux de Jardinage in c. 1680-1690.

The short volume with 109 pages of copper plate engravings (quite a few are double pages) provided garden plans, example fountains and structural elements over which the francophilic gardening set could drool. Many, if not all of the fountain illustrations were copied from Italian Agostino Ramelli's 16th century automata / water-engineering book.

Missouri Botanical Gardens' Rare Books Department have Plans et Dessins Nouveaux de Jardinage available in a fast, smart interface. Another first class website.

Les Carnets de Benjamin Lemoine

I'm not usually much of an aficionado of the comicbook-type genre. Perhaps it was the voyeurism of being able to thumb through four years of someone's random doodles or perhaps the stars were in alignment today.

Benjamin Lemoine has posted his seasonal sketchbooks since 2001 online. The interface is fine, it's easy just to flick through. I do like his eye, although there is a fair bit of dross between the islands of delight (for me...today, anyway).






It reminds me to an extent of the recent and wonderful DQ3, which I haven't bothered to post because I thought most people coming here will have seen it - it's been out a few months and was posted all around the traps. DQ3 is a turn-the-pages sketchbook flash site and is superb.

Lawson Scrapbook Revisit

I posted some of the engravings from Alexander Lawson's scrapbook at the Academy of Natural Sciences last week. These are the final Mexican images (other than that shipping plate) from this firefox-incompatible very very huge pageload.

There are some 500-odd thumbnail images of which perhaps half are birds and a quarter are shells. There's more there worth seeing but this is arguably the end of the eclectic set. (He died in 1847 by the way)

Tissandier's America

There's something that holds the attention about French illustrator Albert Tissandier's decidedly unpretentious recording of his intermittent sojourn in America between 1886 and 1893. And that's in stark constrast to the 8 page (!) introduction accorded the Tissandier collection at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts website - but maybe I was hoping for a bit more detail about the artwork and a little less romanticizing of the great American frontier..

"The pictorial vocabulary that described European monuments and natural formations proved surprisingly inadequate when attempting to represent the span of the Brooklyn Bridge or the scale of the Rocky Mountains on paper or canvas. The savage splendor of the mountains and deserts of the western states could not be described in European terms, either literary or visual."

I only ventured into the first of two volumes at the site. Many of his drawings and etchings were published in La Nature and Le Monde in France. I wouldn't buy them all but there are certainly enough of great quality to warrant a scan through. [click on the pictures above for larger versions]