Collection of Sand Page 4
The heavenly globe represents the firmament as it was on the day of the Sun King’s birth with all the figures of the zodiac painted in blue tints. But the great marvel is the earthly globe, in dark brown and ochre colours, studded with figures (showing, for instance, outrages carried out by savages) and inscriptions containing news sent back by explorers and missionaries to fill the voids in those places where the shape of the regions was still uncertain.
California is portrayed by Coronelli as an island, and he comments in a caption: ‘Some crazy people say that California is a peninsula . . .’ And at another point he says, ‘Here people say there is an island, but this is false and I won’t put one here.’ As for the source of the Nile, after marking it in one place and then moving it after hearing new evidence, Coronelli ends up by inserting a text over the river’s flood waters which closes candidly with these words: ‘I found I had a space to fill so I inserted this caption.’
All the geographical information on new explorations that arrived in Paris at that time was collected at the Observatoire, where Gian Domenico Cassini kept a huge, flat paper map of the earth up to date. Coronelli was meant to draw his information from that source, which forced him to update his work continuously; but progress in cartography hindered rather than helped this man who still saw geography in the same fanciful way that the ancient compilers had done, rather than as a modern science.
It has to be said that it was only thanks to continuing explorations that the unexplored acquired rights of citizenship on maps. Prior to that, what had not been seen did not exist. The Paris exhibition stresses this aspect of an area of knowledge where every new acquisition opens up the awareness of new lacunae: for instance, in the series of maps where the coasts of South America seen by Magellan in his first voyage were thought to belong to a still unknown Australia. Geography establishes itself as a science through trial and error. (That should please Popper.)
The moral that emerges from the history of cartography is always a lesson about lowering human ambitions. If what was implicit in Roman maps was pride in the identification of the totality of the world with the Empire, later in Fra Mauro’s 1459 map we see Europe diminishing compared to the rest of the world. This was one of the first atlases drawn on the basis of accounts by Marco Polo and those who circumnavigated Africa: here the inversion of the cardinal points accentuates this reversal of perspectives.
It is as if representing the world on a limited surface automatically relegated it to a microcosm, hinting at the idea of a larger world containing it. For this reason a map is often situated on the border between two different kinds of geography, the geography of the part and that of the whole, that of the earth and that of the heavens, and the heavens can be an astronomical firmament or the kingdom of God. An Arab tablet made in Constantinople in the sixteenth century bears a very accurate map of the world, surmounted by a (real) compass; a silver pointer pivots on Mecca so the faithful can orientate their prayers in the right direction wherever they happen to be.
From all these aspects we realize that a subjective urge is always present in an operation that seems based on the most neutral objectivity such as cartography. The great cartographic centre in the Renaissance was a city where the dominant spatial theme was uncertainty and variability, since the confines between earth and water there changed constantly: in Venice the maps of the Lagoon had to be updated constantly. (In seventeenth-century Venice Vestri designed a map of the currents which has been shown to be exact in every point by recent satellite photographs taken to determine pollution levels in the Lagoon.) In the seventeenth century the Dutch succeeded the Venetians as the top map-makers, with their dynasties of great artist-cartographers such as the Blaeus from Amsterdam—another place where the confines between land and sea are uncertain.
Cartography as knowledge of the unexplored proceeds at the same rate as map-making that is knowledge of one’s own habitat. The origins of this latter kind of map need to be sought in the delimitation of borders in public record maps. One of the first examples of this kind of map is apparently a piece of prehistoric graffiti from the Val Camonica. (It is interesting to note that whereas the borders between properties were scrupulously marked right from the most remote antiquity, similar precision in establishing frontiers between states seems to be only a recent preoccupation. One of the first treaties to fix frontiers in a non-approximate way was that of Campoformio in 1797, in the Napoleonic era, when military and political geography assumed unprecedented importance.)
There is a constant rapport between cartography that looks elsewhere and cartography that concentrates on familiar territory. In the seventeenth century the expansion of the French navy required a regular production of wood, but the forests of France were becoming sparser and barer. Consequently Colbert felt the necessity for a comprehensive relief map of the forests of France, so as to be constantly up to date with the extent of the country’s timber resources and to be able to plan rationally the restocking and transportation of wood to the shipyards. It was at that point, precisely to support the navy’s expansion, that geographical knowledge of the country’s interior became of the utmost importance in France.
Colbert then summoned to Paris Gian Domenico Cassini (1625–1712), a native of Perinaldo near San Remo, and professor at the University of Bologna, in order to run the astronomical Observatory. And here we see once more the link between earth and sky: it was from the Paris Observatory that a dynasty of astronomers, the Cassini family, worked for four generations on a map of France that went into minute detail. The theoretical problems of triangulation and measurement that lay behind the map were at the centre of scientific debate and the very detailed completion of the map would take over sixty years.
The Cassini map, on the scale of one ‘line’ for every hundred toises (1:86,400: a toise was about 6.5 feet), is displayed in the exhibition in a reproduction that occupies a whole stand and overflows from the walls on to the floor. Every forest in France is drawn tree by tree, every church has its bell-tower, every village is drawn roof by roof, so that one has the dizzying feeling that beneath one’s eyes are all the trees and all the bell-towers and all the roofs of the Kingdom of France. And one cannot help remembering Borges’s story about the map of the Chinese Empire which coincided precisely with the physical extent of the Empire.
The human figures which Coronelli felt the need to insert in the expanses of his globe have disappeared from Cassini’s map. Yet it is precisely these deserted, uninhabited maps that arouse in our imagination the desire to live inside them, to grow small enough to find one’s way amid the dense signs, to run through these maps, to lose oneself in them.
The description of the earth refers on the one hand to the description of the heavens and the cosmos, but on the other it suggests one’s own interior geography. Amongst the documents in the exhibition are the photographs of mysterious graffiti which appeared a few years ago on the walls of the new town area of Fez in Morocco. It turned out that they had been put there by an illiterate tramp, a peasant who had left the countryside but had not integrated into urban life and in order to find his way had felt the need to mark the journeys of a secret map of his, which he superimposed on to the topography of the modern city which remained foreign and hostile to him.
The tramp’s procedure was symmetrical and opposite to that carried out by an Italian cleric from the beginning of the fourteenth century, Opicino de Canistris. He could not speak, his right arm was paralysed, he had lost most of his memory, and was often in thrall to mystic visions and suffered the anguish of being a sinner, but Opicino had one dominant obsession: interpreting the meaning of geographical maps. He constantly drew the map of the Mediterranean, copying t
he shape of the coasts all over the place, sometimes superimposing on this drawing the outline of the same map but orientated in a different direction, and he inserted into these geographical outlines drawings of human figures and animals, characters from his own life and theological allegories, sexual penetrations and angelic apparitions, placing alongside them a dense written commentary on the story of his misfortunes and prophecies concerning the destiny of the world.
In an extraordinary example of ‘art brut’ and cartographic madness, Opicino simply projects his own interior world on to the map of lands and seas. Using an inverse procedure, the Society of ‘Précieuses’ in the seventeenth century would try to represent psychology using the code of geographical maps: the map of ‘tenderness’ devised by Mlle Madeleine de Scudéry shows the Lake of Indifference, the Rock of Ambition and so on. This topographical, horizontal idea of psychology, which shows relationships of distance and perspective between passions that are projected on to a uniform expanse will later give way to Freud and his geological and vertical idea of depth psychology, made up of superimposed layers.
[1980]
The Museum of Wax Monsters
In a window looking out on to the street a young woman lies supine in a white, flowing dress adorned with lace frills, her sleeping face with its delicate features the colour of mortuary yellow, her chastely covered breast rising and falling with regular breaths. A little bit further on a poster shows a colour photograph of Siamese twins, or rather one single male child who divides above the stomach into two identical boys. Around all this is a canvas façade painted red with gilded adornments and the words: Dr P. Spitzner’s Great Anatomical and Ethnological Museum.
For over eighty years, from 1856, Dr Spitzner’s anatomical wax museum was a fairground attraction, especially in the towns of Belgium. Initially it had been set up in Paris, with the full endorsement of a scientific institution (eighty of its exhibits came from Dr Dupuytren’s famous collection of pathological models); but various vicissitudes turned it into an itinerant museum which found its proper place amidst fairground stalls, merry-go-rounds, shooting galleries and menageries. All the while it proclaimed its educative and moralistic intentions: the foreword to its guide opened with a kind of ten commandments for a healthy life, which is the first joy and duty of good citizens. The horrific visions that the museum displayed (tumours and ulcers and buboes, or livers with cirrhosis and stomachs with fibrosis) were meant to inculcate in the young the terrors of venereal diseases and alcoholism. However, the sections devoted to these ‘culpable’ diseases was just a part, albeit an important one, of the exhibition, which as a whole seemed to invite onlookers to fix their eyes on things that we are usually inclined to turn them away from: the possible deformations of our flesh, the hidden physiognomy of our innards, the agony we feel within ourselves if we see a surgical operation.
In addition to this schooling in horror there was also, strangely, ethnological documentation: a parade of wax statues representing bushmen or Australian or American Indian savages, life-size, a sight which in those pre-cinema days must have been much more dramatic than we can imagine today. On closer inspection, the motif that is common to the whole museum dominated also in this ethnological section: a nakedness that was ‘different’, intimate like all nakedness but distanced by disease, deformity or the ‘otherness’ of another civilization or race, with in addition the unease that wax arouses in us when it imitates the pallor of human skin.
Who this Dr Spitzner was in real life is not clear. One suspects that he was not a doctor at all. In the photographs he and his wife have more the look of fairground impresarios than apostles of science; but one can never tell. Certainly, the sadism which is an essential component of the visual world he offers us was of a different order from the more poetic sadism of the Florentine Clemente Susini, or the more wizard-like version of the Neapolitan Raimondo di Sangro, or the purely spectacular sadism of Marie Tussaud, who was English by adoption. But these last three names all belong to the eighteenth century, with all the complexity of intellectual and psychological attitudes that characterized that period; whereas the date of the foundation of the Spitzner Museum takes us right into the age of positivism and scientism and popularizing pedagogy; a date that is no less glorious, however, if one thinks that it is the same year as the publication of Les Fleurs du mal and Madame Bovary, and of the related court cases against what was then abhorred or revered as an ‘exploration of the truth’.
As in those lofty cases, so also the not easily definable enterprise of Dr Spitzner had to struggle against the hostility of the prudish, censorship by the authorities, the protests of fathers of families; and the same battles were refought in our own century when Mrs Spitzner, after being widowed, started up the travelling museum again in the 1920s. The fact is that, in the memories of various Belgian writers and artists, their first terrified entry into Dr Spitzner’s pavilion occupies a powerful place: suffice to say that the artist Paul Delvaux declared that this was the fundamental experience in the formation of his visionary world, even before his discovery of De Chirico.
The museum went missing during the war (the exterior billboards, certainly not a negligible part of its fascination, were destroyed in a bombing raid), but was rediscovered in a warehouse, and now Dr Spitzner’s Museum has been reconstructed and put on temporary display by the Belgian Cultural Centre in Paris, in the Place Beaubourg. The first thing that strikes you is how the faithful imitation of nature, instead of seeming timeless, is full of the colour of that period. It is the look with which these models have been conceived that is nineteenth-century: a mixture of attraction and distance at the same time, of celebration and condemnation of the ‘truth’.
In the reconstruction of its environment they have tried to preserve that atmosphere that lies somewhere between the scientific and the seedy, an atmosphere that is that of the hospital laboratory, the morgue and the fairground booth (all of which it must have had at the time), including the penumbra against which the cadaverous nudes stand out and the muffled fairground music that sounds as if it is being played by a country band. All that is missing are the shouts of the touts and the guides who—according to the chronicles of the time—would demonstrate the ‘Anatomical Venus’, which could be dismantled into forty pieces, moving from the seductive fragrance of her skin to the dark tangle of blood-vessels and ganglia, to the web of nerves, and the whiteness of her skeleton.
Not just wax models but also natural exhibits are on display, such as for instance a complete human skin, that of a thirty-five-year-old man (a unique piece, the catalogue warns us, as no museum holds anything like it): this human carpet, which is squashed like a flower inside the pages of a book, seemed to me the most friendly and comforting thing in the midst of everything else. I have to admit I have never felt any attraction for innards (just as I have never felt any strong urge to explore psychological depths); that perhaps explains my preference for this man who is completely extended, his whole surface unfolded before us, devoid of any thickness or hidden intention.
All in all, apart from a few notes about its atmosphere, I cannot really be a good chronicler of the Spitzner exhibition: my gaze tended instinctively to avoid any image in which insides spilled outwards. I preferred not to loiter, especially in the pavilion devoted to venereal diseases, comforted by the cheering news that some clinical aspects on show there have disappeared today thanks to medical advances. (This is said in the catalogue, which boasts that even the medical specialist will find the exhibition of historical interest, since certain lesions caused by syphilis have now ‘abandoned the pathological scene’.)
I prefer instead to lean in contemplation over the glass bell-jar containing a reproduc
tion of the guillotined head of the anarchist Caserio, a wax model made immediately after the original head fell into the basket (1894). His sliced neck is as fresh as meat in a butcher’s shop, his expression is fixed for ever with staring, rolled-back eyes, dilated nostrils, locked jaws: the effect is not dissimilar to that produced by a sudden flash photograph, but here the objectification is total, without any trace of subjective framing.
The most incredible example of sadist-surrealist fantasy is to be found among the representations of the various phases of childbirth and gynaecological operations. A complete model of a patient undergoing a Caesarean section lies with eyes wide open, her face distorted by pain, her hair impeccable, her calves tied together, dressed in a long, lace gown, which is open only at the part of her body which has been cut open by the scalpel, where the baby appears. Four male hands are placed on her body (two operating, and two holding her waist): fine wax hands with manicured nails, ghostly hands since they are not supported by arms but adorned only with white cuffs and with the ends of the sleeves of a black jacket, as though the whole ceremony was being performed by people in evening dress.
One of the attractions that brought (and still brings) visitors flocking to the exhibition was the Gallery of Freaks. There is a wax facsimile of the private parts of a certain John Chiffort, ‘born in the county of Lancaster, and reproduced from life when he was twenty years old; he possesses three legs and two penises, both capable of reproduction’. Were it not for his central leg, which has atrophied and is frankly very unpleasant to see, the two penises, which are symmetrical and parallel to each other, have such a natural, gracious look that you could easily believe it might be normal for all males to be so endowed.
The opposite case to this is that of the Tocci brothers. Born in Sardinia in 1877, each of them possessed his own head, and his own perfectly normal pair of arms and shoulders, but from the level of the stomach downwards they were one single person, with just one stomach and a single pair of legs. Their wax model (which is reproduced also in the posters for the exhibition) shows them apparently at the age of nine or ten, and the emotion they arouse is heightened by the fact that their faces are those of two very handsome boys with a lively air about them. ‘They currently enjoy excellent health and have been on tour in the main European capitals. Without a shadow of a doubt they constitute the most curious phenomenon that has ever been seen.’ To these words from the old catalogue is added a more recent note: ‘In 1897, after making their fortune, the Tocci brothers married two sisters and retired to a property near Venice, where they would die in 1940 at the age of 63.’