This week’s guest blogger is Hannah DeWitt, from the University of Edinburgh, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

Francesco Barozzi, Admirandvm Illud Geometricum, (Venice:  Apud Gratiosum Perchacinum, sumptibus Io. Baptistæ Fantini Patauini, [1586]  (Edinburgh University Library *O.21.3 and *O.21.4)

This week’s look at Venetian Images encounters mathematical figures that have remarkable continuity with modern textbooks.

This text, Admirandum Illud Geometricum, was written by the influential Italian mathematician and astronomer Francesco Barozzi (1537-1604). Barozzi was born in Crete. He studied at the University of Padua and later lectured at the university. He is known for his efforts revive science and maths through re-examining the work of ancient mathematicians and philosophers. His work includes new interpretations and applications of ancient theories, particularly those of Euclid. Previous to Admirandum Illud Geometricum, Barozzi translated and added commentary to Euclid’s Elements in Procli Diadochi (1560). He also translated texts by Archimedes and Hero.

Barozzi led a tumultuous private life. At university, he was accused of taking someone’s hair without consent, an act that has been suggested to be linked with occult practices. Later in his life he was convicted by the Inquisition of an unknown charge. He was accused and tried for causing a terrible rainstorm in Crete. Eventually he was convicted and fined for sorcery. His translations of Nostradamus and interest in predictions contributed to his reputation for engaging in occult practices and his final conviction essentially ended his academic career.

Admirandum Illud Geometricum is an exhaustive instructional text detailing thirteen different methods for producing parallel lines on a plane. While Barozzi more typically worked on translation or commentary, this work is original, though it does frequently reference ancient mathematicians and classical theories.

While the more interesting images are the mathematical figures, the title page printer’s device belonging to Gratioso Perchacino of Venice is worth mentioning. This woodcut of a winged serpent on a pole is most immediately associated with the caduceus, the staff of Hermes with two snakes and wings that is commonly misused to represent medical practices. The staff of Asclepius, the god of medicine, is meant to have one snake and no wings it the symbol which is appropriately meant to represent medicine. But as in the Barozzi image, it is often mixed with characteristics of the caduceus. Included in the device is “SALVS VITÆ” or “The Help of Life.” This phrase is frequently associated with the Roman goddess, Salus, the goddess of health and well-being.

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The most impressive images in the book are full page renderings of mathematical compasses. These are simple images with enough detail and exacting scale to elicit a startling recognition of similarities between and lack of change in the depicted compasses the modern versions of the same tool. It is also very likely that the exact dimensions of the woodcuts themselves were created by tracing the figures with similar tools.

All other images in the text are mathematical diagrams. Some of the figures appear more than once, with identical figures appearing up to four times. The image below appears three times, but is made by two seperate woodcut blocks.  It appears on two sides of one leaf and again on a leaf printed separately. In order to duplicate the images this way, the printing block would have needed to be painstakingly carved a second time. This suggests that the printer expected to print the images at least twice on the same side of the same sheet, but it wasn’t necessary. This effort emphasises the importance the author attributed to having the image visible for each point made about the diagram.This process is duplicated throughout the text, but the difference in these particular images is made obvious through an error. The first and third image were printed using a block with an error, a backwards ‘K,’while the second image is identical in scale and precise measurement, but has a correctly facing ‘K.’

A second set of figures has a similar error. The three images appear on the same sheet in this instance, making the use of two blocks necessary. In these figures, a ‘N’ is inverted.

While a majority of the images had the lettering carved into the woodcut, a few used type. This can be seen in diagrams labeling the names of the shape.

As the text progresses, the complicity of the figures and lessons increase. These more complex shapes frequently build on a simpler figure. In order to achieve the precision of these diagrams, the first image would have needed to be traced or carefully measured and redrawn before adding the new elements of the second, more complex printing block.

The variety and replication of the diagrams attest to Barozzi’s particular dedication to images as part of his teaching method.

Two copies of this edition of the book are owned by the University of Edinburgh. One is bound in a light vellum binding and the other in a dark, ornate leather binding. The first copy (*O.21.3) bears no indication of ownership previous to the university. It has an 18th century Edinburgh shelfmark suggesting that it arrived in the second half of the century.

The second copy (*O.21.4) is more expensively bound and is stamped with a gilded owner’s stamp belonging to Sir John Rivers, 1^st Baronet, who died in 1651.  Rivers’ books, with this memorable stamp are scattered among a number of libraries in the U.K. and U.S.A.  The signature of a second owner, C Hutton 1785, can be found on a flyleaf. Hutton was Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, and would have had an obvious interest in .

The precision and frequent duplication of images are unique to the care Barozzi shows in having this text printed. His dedication to what he believed was the superiority of mathematical certainty is evident in the attention to detail and effort placed in producing his diagrams.

Hannah DeWitt

University of Edinburgh

For references and further reading:

https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasures-francesco-barozzis-procli-diadochi

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Barocius.html

https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/barocius-franciscus

http://data.cervantesvirtual.com/manifestation/289947

https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/court-of-chivalry/559-rivers-bowton

http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/?catalogue=charles-hutton

This week the exhibition curator, Laura Moretti, of the University of St. Andrews, writes about the finest, and probably most famous book in our selection: Andrea Palladio’s “Four Books of Architecture”. 

Andrea Palladio,  I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, (Venetia: Dominico de’ Franceschi, 1570)  (University of Edinburgh Library, Special Collections, Smith.1594)

Andrea Palladio (1508-80) first published his I quattro libri dell’architettura in Venice in 1570, in the printing shop of Domenico de’ Franceschi (fl. 1557-75), publisher and book dealer from Brescia, at the sign of “Regina Virtus” in the Frezzeria. The book enjoyed extraordinary fortune, through its numerous editions and translations, becoming the main channel of the widespread knowledge and appreciation of his author’s work.

Title page detail

Palladio already had important experience in the field of book publishing. In 1556, Daniele Barbaro – a refined and sophisticated Venetian patrician, and already the architect’s patron and supporter – put through the press a translation with commentary on the architectural treatise of the Roman author Vitruvio, complemented by Palladio’s lavish illustrations.

In Palladio’s treatise, the subject matter is subdivided in four sections: the first book – dedicated to a friend and patron, the Vicentine Count Giacomo Angarano – discusses the fundamental principles of building and the five architectural orders; in the second book Palladio presents his portfolio of projects for residential palaces and country houses, and reconstructions of ancient Greek and Roman houses; in the third book – dedicated to the Prince Emanuele Filiberto Duke of Savoy (1528-80) – the architect treats roads, bridges, squares, basilicas and other public buildings; while the fourth and final book is dedicated to antique temples in Rome and elsewhere, in the Italian peninsula and beyond. Book One, Book Three, and Book Four also contain introductory letters to the readers.

Book 1. The Composite Order

Book 1. Stairs

Book 2. House of the Greeks (detail)

Book 4, detail of the Temple of Portunus

The edition is finely illustrated: all the books are introduced by a full-page woodcut and illustrated by numerous diagrams and architectural details. The relationship between words and image is heavily weighted towards the latter. The text is often used to explain and elucidate the drawings, and frequent lists referring to corresponding details in the illustrations provide precise terminology and further interpretations. The drawings frequently present measurements, which give a clear sense of the proportions between different architectural elements. Palladio very rarely makes use of perspective: the only exceptions are constituted by the description of brick courses and layers in Book One, and the representation of Caesar’s Rhine bridge in Book Three.

Book One, detail of brick courses.

Book 3. Detail of Caesar’s Rhine Bridge

The majority of the drawings are plans, elevations or sections, variously articulated in the page layout. Contextual elements defining the buildings’ surroundings are rare and limited to some schematic representations of water and occasional exemplifications of soil. Shadows are consistently employed to confer profundity to the architectural elements, from the depiction of minute details to the outlines of massive buildings. The potentialities of the medium are fully explored and used at their best.

Book 4. The Pantheon

While in the depiction of ancient buildings Palladio shows an obsessive attention to the accuracy and faithful rendering of detail, the representations of his design projects present elements of greater complexity. More than faithful copies of the completed buildings, they seem to be idealizations, perhaps the architect’s successive reflections or maybe the sign of ideas not fully executed.

Book Two, Villa Godi, Lonedo di Lugo di Vicenza

The copy now preserved at the University of Edinburgh comes from the library of Adam Smith FRSA (1723-90), the Scottish economist, philosopher and author, and a key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment era. The University of Edinburgh holds about half his original library (850 works in 1,600 volumes), including books on politics, economics, law and history, but also many literary works, particularly French literature, and books on architecture.

The full catalogue record for our copy can be found here: https://discovered.ed.ac.uk/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=44UOE_ALMA21147069860002466&context=L&vid=44UOE_VU2&search_scope=default_scope&tab=default_tab&lang=en_US

We have a micro exhibition, of illustrated books from Renaissance Italy, running in CRC from 13th April to 15th June.  This is in collaboration with Linda Borean of the Università degli Studi di Udine and Laura Moretti of the University of St. Andrews, and their project: Venetian Renaissance prints, drawings and illustrated books in Scottish collections. https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/venice-in-scotland/

There are very many wonderful illustrated books from Venice in our collections; far more than we have space to exhibit.  Over the next few weeks we will be posting about the ones we have included, and some that we couldn’t fit in.  On 16th April Laura will be giving a talk in CRC.  We plan to get out everything we have blogged about for that.

Laura will be posting further information on the blog of her current project Thinking 3D. https://www.thinking3d.ac.uk/

Our first post is by Elizabeth Quarmby Lawrence, Rare Books Librarian

Girolamo Marafioti (1567-1626) De arte reminiscentiae,  (Venice : Jo Baptistam Bertonum, 1602.)  (Edinburgh University Library: EE.13.36/1)

“The art of memory” survives in the modern world mostly in the form of self-help books and motivational training courses, but it actually has a long and distinguished history, back to classical antiquity.

Classical lawyers and politicians, needing to be able to make lengthy, formally-structured speeches from memory, used the techniques of artifical memory.  In their imagination they would turn each of the points of their speech into a strong visual image, and then arrange the images in order within a structure they could easily remember.  Typically this would be a building, either real and familiar, or created in the imagination for the purpose.

These techniques remained in common use well into the seventeenth century.  In a culture where public affairs were still largely conducted orally, the ability to speak fluently, persuasively and at length, in public, was vital to a professional career.  As well as being useful to lawyers and politicians, artificial memory techniques were useful to students, whose academic exercises and examinations were largely based around oral disputations.  The techniques were popular with the Friars, whose lives were dedicated to preaching and teaching religious knowledge, and who had to be able to explain complex doctrine accurately.

The technique of artificial memory was passed down from Classical antiquity through three texts – Cicero’s De Oratore, an anonymous handbook Ad C. Herennium, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.  In the Middle Ages it was refined, improved and expanded on.   This continued into the Renaissance, where artificial memory was often elaborated to the point that it became an intellectual game, rather than a practical technique.  The Renaissance had a fascination for imagery, symbolism, emblems and hidden meanings, and keen interest in imposing a structure on knowledge.  The symbolism of artificial memory very easily plays to all of these, and elaborate symbolism and word games can easily be incorporated into it.  In some Renaissance examples of artificial memory it is difficult to tell which is the material to be memorised and which is the structure supposed to hold it.

This little handbook was written within this late tradition.  Instead of using locations in a building as the places to lodge the memories, it uses both sides of both hands to create 92 places, each marked with a symbol – which had itself to be memorised before it could be used as a tool to remember anything else.

Many of the illustrated books which have been included in the project Venetian Renaissance prints, drawings and illustrated books in Scottish collections are high-quality, luxury productions.  This little book was produced with quite different ambitions.  It was intended for a relatively popular market – it was reprinted several times, including in an Italian translation – and the illustrations are entirely practical and very necessary to explain the text.

It is not clear how this copy reached Edinburgh, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it passed through the hands of two bibliophiles, or bibliomaniacs.  First came Charles-Louis Van Bavière, (1767-1815), Secretary of the Academy and Faculty of Law, Brussels.   His professional life seems not to have preoccupied him much: he was a dedicated bibliophile with a reputation for having an eye for a bargain, and for finding unlikely treasures in improbable-looking sales.  After his death, his huge library was sold at auction over 22 days, in Brussels in 1817. 

This sort of sale undoubtedly appealed to the book’s next owner, the antiquarian and legendary bibliomaniac Richard Heber (1773 – 1833), whose vast library, collected all over Europe, and housed in half a dozen separate locations, was sold after his death in a series of sixteen sales, in England, France and Belgium, realizing the then enormous sum of more than £60,000.  Books from both these scattered collections are in wide circulation today, readily identifiable from their owner’s bookplates and ink stamp.

The Library holds a very rich collection of the records of its own activities, stretching right back to the charter of Clement Littil’s bequest in 1580, which started the library.  Many of the books acquired at every period since then are still here, often bearing physical evidence of their history in the collections, in the form of inscriptions, old shelf marks, or bindings distinctive of a particular period.  The records and the books have the potential to be a very rich source of information and useful to researchers in many different subjects, but currently they are poorly understood and documented and are very difficult to use.  

This summer we welcome to CRC Nathalie Bertaud, an Employ.Ed intern, who is working on the records of the first two and half centuries, or thereabouts, of the library’s history, producing a research guide and collecting the data to improve the descriptions of the records on the catalogue of the University Archives.  She has been making many discoveries: 

Ever wonder how long a book or other object has been in the library and where it comes from? How much it cost or by whom it was given to the library? Or still, what the money given by students was spent on? With a good number of early press, subject and author catalogues, as well as matriculation and donation books, the history of the University’s library is not so dark a place to delve in. As we embrace these early records and their flimsy pages and characteristic smell, let us dive into the library’s history and follow, record after record, the life of its marvels.

The library has, from very early on, been a welcoming home to objects other than books. This can be seen in items Da.1.18 and 19, as both contain several lists of wonders and curiosities. We are indeed told that precious items were kept in a chest – a sort of 17th century equivalent to our fire-safe! Among the items precious enough to go in the chest were the Bohemian Protest, the marriage contract between Mary Queen of Scots and Francis Dauphin of France, and a thistle banner printed on satin 1640 being found carelessly put in one of Mr Nairn’s books. What is more, a list is given us of portraits that were hung in the library, a celebration of illustrious men and women. Featured celebrities included Tiberius Claudius, Martin Luther, and Mary Queen of Scots. We still do hold some of these portraits. Items related to the discipline of anatomy were also gifted to the library, and we are told in several lists that these comprised the ‘skeleton of a French man’, or a ‘gravel stone (…) cut out of the bladder of Colonel Ruthven’, who, we are informed in Da.1.31, ‘lived six weeks thereafter’.

Now, where did the books and objects come from? Well, we know a fair amount about key benefactors of the library, as their names are listed over and over again, their generosity being commemorated by several library keepers. Such examples of commemorative lists can be found in Da.1.18 and 19, where the first page lists such generous men as Clement Litil, William Drummond or James Nairn.

Item Da.1.31, a book of donations started by the librarian William Henderson in the late 17th century, gives us short descriptions of benefactors, such as: ‘Isobell Mitchell, at the time of her decease which was upon the 19th of October 1667 left to the college as a token of her great love to the flourishing of piety and good learning the sum of a hundred merks Scots’. Yet, less renowned people also made a contribution to the library’s collection, and when we chance upon a brief description of these almost anonymous benefactors, we get a sense of how collections get built. Such an example is: ‘By Mr David Ferguson, student in Kirkcaldy, a youth of great hopes but was snatched away by an early death (…) a manuscript rare for the writing’, or ‘George Bosman book-seller, gave in the Breviary of the B. Virgin, a manuscript very curiously written & adorned with rich colours besides many exquisite pictures’, or still ‘Mr John MacGregory, student, gave in a Hebrew Bible’.

As lists of new accessions are fairly well represented in the records, we are also offered insight into what places were hubs for book purchasing in the 17th and 18th centuries. London and Holland seem to have been such places, as they are mentioned regularly, for instance in Da.1.32 and 34. The cost of the books purchased is sometimes given as well, and we quickly understand, from looking at the records, that books were purchased not only from donations but also from student fees. However, the money paid by the students was not always used for the purchase of books. We get a glimpse into the day-to-day management of the library when we run through items Da.1.32, 34 or 43, where we can read that money was spent on fees for services rendered, such as ‘for drink money for bringing in books gifted to the library’, ‘for washing 12 pictures’ or ‘for cleaning the library’. It was also spent on library necessaries like ‘paper, pens and ink, and postage’, ‘for binding books’ or still ‘for transcribing a copy of the New Catalogue for the library’. All these wonderful details, sometimes scribbled in tiny script, allow us to get a better understanding of the early history of the library and its management.