No More Learning

Alberti's innovation in the field of decryption was decidedly Guten- bergian. The printing press had already made it plain that in order to print normal texts many more E's were needed than, say, X's or Y's. A glance in any typesetter's case will confirm this. Alberti, like Edgar Allan Poe's X-ing a Paragrab, threw preCIsely thIS glance at texts encrypted in the old-fashioned, manual way and not through his polyalphabetic method. When there are far more Y's than E's in such a text, this means plamly and simply that the letter E has presumably been encrypted as Y. In other words, Alberti transferred the coldness of numbers to the sacred realm of everyday grammatical sense or semantics.
2. 1. 3 Impact
2. 1. 3. 1 Perspective and Letterpress
This long digression into the history of textual media should make one thing clear: Alberti mathematized old manual techniques like painting and writing, and at the very least he had explicitly made ref- erence to this modernization before Gutenberg. The question remains whether this reference before and to Gutenberg is not also true of Alberti's mathematization of painting. Busch cites a remarkable passage, though I have not been able to verify it. No less a person than Giorgio Vasari, the contemporary and biographer of all of these painters, wrote in his 1550 book Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects that "in the year 1457, when the very useful method of printing books was invented by Johann Guttenberg, a German, Leon Battista discovered something similar," albeit merely in the field of painting (Vasari, 1983, pp. 346-7). In an age of growing national pride, this was probably supposed to imply that Italy's technical achievements had caught up with Germany's.
Contemporaries thus already saw a connection between the art of artistic writing and the art of artistic perspective, ars artificialiter scribendi and perspectiva artificiosa. This supposition can be theoreti- cally substantiated.
The content of a medium, McLuhan decreed, is always another medium. All of the Renaissance drawings, which described how to build a camera obscura and how best to install it between the painter
65
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
and the living object, were stored and passed down in books, particu- larly in textbooks. For the first, yet certainly not the last time, we are encountering something like a union of media: the printed book, on the one hand, and the drawing brought to a higher level of precision throngh the camera obscura or linear-perspectival geometry on the other. As soon as one recognizes that, the lowest common multiple of the two media becomes obvious. Through Gutenberg's invention it was possible for the first time that all of the copies of a book, or at least of an edition, presented the same text, the same printing errors, and the same page numbers. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote in a poem about Gutenberg, "How greatly this page here resembles a thousand other pages" (Enzensberger, 1976, p. 4). (Not to mention the uniformity of computer software, with which my lecture notes and the notes of countless others have been drawn up. )
Elizabeth Eisenstein very convincingly argues that the new, mechanically perfect reproducibility of the medium of handwriting also put competitive pressure on other manual arts. The reproducible book as such required illustrations that were equally as reproducible and exact - not to make readers or art lovers happy, but rather to store and transmit technical knowledge, the most shining example of which was the invention of the letterpress itself. Eisenstein directly connects the great upturn in technology, science, and engineering in Europe in the modern era with the availability of technical drawings, construction plans, and sketches, which looked the same in every printed copy simply because they were indestructible reproductions of a single original. As we know, the techniques of wood engrav- ing and copperplate etching, which were developed or perfected at that time, provided this reproducibility, whose lack in other cultures resulted in drawings showing more mistakes - or more noise - as they were copied from copies of copies, etc. But who or what ensured that the original was a correct reproduction of its original, which may have been a woman or the camera obscura itself? My supposition: scientifically based perspective and its technical implementation - in other words, none other than the camera obscura once again. Even though the camera obscura was not a camera in the sense of photog- raphy or film, and consequently it could not replace the manual work of drawing and painting, these handicrafts nevertheless fell under its scientific-technical control. When one realizes that in the centuries before Gutenberg's invention the operational secrets of all manual workers were always only communicated from master to jonrney- man, from generation to generation, and when one realizes that secrecy was so important and promising, that entire cults and rituals
66
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
were erected around it (hke wrought-Iron work), one can appreci- ate what it means to be able to entrust building plans along with explanatory texts henceforth to the printed book. Real guild secrets were replaced by the knowledge of engineers, which was in principle also possibly autodidactic, and ritual guild secrets were replaced by the specially invented and complementary secrets of associations like the Freemasons, which made imaginary theories out of the former practices of masons.
Print technology made the autodidact possible - rhat IS the point upon whiCh everythmg depends. The book became a medium in which technical innovations as such could take place. They could be stored, shared, and even advanced with rhe help of technical drawings in the text. Models of a mill or a camera obscura are easier to understand than their so-called reality. This is rhe reason why the excursion into letterpress was not a digression, but rather it furnished the historical foundations for the astonishing and otherwise inexplicable fact that Europe, in contrast to other cultures, has produced one technical medium after another since the Renaissance. It can concisely be said that Gutenberg's letterpress made the techniques that superseded it - from photography to the computer - possible in the first place. It was the unique medium that set other media free. This is true for Diirer's age as well as today. Without specifications, manuals, and technical drawings new generations of computers would be an impossibility.
2. 1. 3. 2 The Self-Printing of Nature
There is evidence to support this hypothesis about the practical uses of linear perspective and the camera obscura. The first piece of evi- dence also brings up an important detail from rhe prehistory of pho- tography. Namely, the seventeenrh century had already attempted to eliminate the great handicap of the camera obscura, rhat is, the necessity of manually painting over the images that emerged. Anato- mists like Vesalius in Bologna or botanists like Gessner in Basel took on the epoch-making task of pouring everything knowable about the human body or the plant world into printer's ink and printing, which greatly increased the need for precise illustrations. From 1657 onwards, therefore, nature researchers have also experimented with the possibility of transferring the objects of their research onto paper without the mediation of a wood or copperplate engraver. A Dane named Walgenstein, who will soon be mentioned again in connec- tion with the lanterna magica, reportedly succeeded in preparing the leaves of plants so that an imprint of them could be made. At the
67
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
start, the leaves were simply held in smoke until they were black euough to leave behind an impression, but later on the very same material employed in the printing of Gutenberg's letters was also employed to print objects, as the leaves were prepared with printer's ink. In any case, the images emerged in their natural size and witb all the detail, but unfortunately only relatively few Gutenberg leaves could be produced from one botanical leaf. After tbat, it was worn out and had to be replaced by another leaf. Such attempts at least show, as Eder has already emphasized in his lengthy and old History of Photography, the clear tendency to set technically reproducible scientific illustrations alongside technically reproducible type (Eder, 1978, p. 33) - not only, as Eder assumes, to save the high costs of copperplate and wood engravers, but also to be able to compete with the precision, and that means from that time on the scientific nature of reproductions. This clarifies the connection between perspective representation, the camera obscura, and Gutenberg technology. In short, we can say that leaves (of plants) became leaves (of books) - while plants of the field, forest, and meadow became the content of optical media.
2. 1. 3. 3 Europe's Colonial Power
The second piece of historical evidence is even more amusing or elo- quent, at least for people who do not suffer from political correctness. In his wonderful book, The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry, Samuel Edgerton also recounts the history of the Jesuits who invaded China in droves during the Ming Dynasty, starting around 1600, in order to preach their faith - and not without success. The reason why the missionaries belonged to the Jesuit Order of all people is still being considered today.
In Peking, Father Matteo Ricci and his successors started an enor- mous enlightenment campaign. They equipped their own library with scientific books, and would you believe it, 19 of these titles were about perspective (Edgerton, 1991, p. 261). Rather than educating the heathens, though, the Jesuits planned to convert them by produc- ing and distributing Christian images, which had already helped an otherwise very insensible theology to triumph in Central and South America. However, the Jesuit in the Vatican who was responsible made a bad mistake. He determined that the native draughtsmen and copperplate engravers who were supposed to translate the images of Christianity into the image universe of Chinese culture should not be trained in Peking itself, but rather in distant Japan (Edgerton,
68
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
1991, p. 266). In other words, the 19 treatIses on perspective, from which the so-called natives could have learned to draw, were not available.
Thus it happened as it had to happen. In 1627, Father Johannes Adam Schall von Bell decided to send four ambitious volumes with "diagrams and explanations of curious machines from the Far West" to the printing presses in Peking (Edgerton, 1991, p. 271). The so-called Theatra Machinarum, a book genre that not coinciden- tally had flourished since the Renaissance, normally contained exact perspective copperplate or wood engravings of existing or merely fictional machines - sketches, therefore, which supposedly enabled the observer to successfully recreate three-dimensional machines from two-dimensional images. Schall's native, presumably Japanese, wood engravers accordingly went to work. They had the European books along with a Chinese translation of the texts directly in front of them, but they were nonetheless completely incapable of correctly copying the proportions in perspective.
Up until the first decades of the nineteenth century, imperial China continued to print these kinds of incorrect graphics in encyclopae- dias and scientific-technical manuals. You can imagine the results. China was the most technologically advanced country in the world during the Middle Ages, but it remained trapped in a state that made it very easy for the English and other European powers to defeat China in one war after another from 1840 onwards. Perhaps the lesson to be learned from this is that linear perspective was not simply an aesthetic or artistic shift in taste, but rather a thoroughly technical re-evaluation of all optical values, which was inconceiv- able without the corresponding mathematical qualifications, such as during the Ming and Manchu dynasties in China. In a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, which I will return to later, a "Chinaman" of all people poses the "stupid question": "How is it that objects grow smaller as they recede? " (Hoffmann, 1952, p. 77). Linear perspective remained one of the arcana of modern European power
until approximately 1850, when it once again reached Japan and elsewhere.
So much for linear perspective from the perspective of what Shannon calls the receiver side. The camera obscura captured light and cast it further, but it did not send it. For thousands of years, that was left entirely up to simple signal systems consisting of mirrors and torches, which would determine the outcome of battles. Long before Einstein's proof that the speed of light could not be surpassed, sol- diers already knew the advantage of rapid communication.
69
? OPTICAL MEDIA
2. 2 Lanterna Magica and the Age of the World Picture
The last task of this hrief history of art must therefore be to recount when, how, and why images also received a transmitting apparatus and thus learned how to be transmitted without the classical means of transportation provided by the postal system. The transmitting appa- ratus was a technical but not a historical twin of the camera obscura, and it went by the lovely name lanterna magica or "magic lantern. "
In essence, the lanterna magica simply turns the camera obscura inside out. A hole in a wall once again separates inside and outside, system and environment. But in place of the sun, which in the camera obscura transmits images from the environment into the system, the lanterna magica employs an artificial light source in the interior of the system, such as a simple candle. Using either front or rear projec- tion, this candle shines through interposed concave mirrors, or later systems of lenses, and illuminates a drawn and often colored pattern, whose mirror image is then projected outside through the hole and onto a screen - the forerunner of all film screens. So much for the principle, now for the history.
2. 2. 1 Magic Lanterns in Action
The direct precursor of the magical device was the well-known bull's eye lantern, which was made by Liesegang, a photography dealer and historian in whose honor his hometown of Dusseldorf happily renamed a street. This ancestral line appropriately casts the light of war on the lanterna magica (following Michel Foucault). Bull's eye lanterns were officially used to illuminate battlegrounds, but they were unofficially used by hunters, fishermen, poachers, and murder- ers. Even today, Greek fishing boats sail out in the Aegean at night using bull's eye lanterns to lure their prey like moths into an inescap- able light-trap. Bull's eye lanterns were absolutely forbidden during Absolutism for similar reasons: in German principalities they were forbidden because poachers (long before the invention of highways, automobile headlights, and dead game across the asphalt) ruined the route to hares and deer, which belonged to the sovereign, who had an absolute hunting monopoly; in France, the punishment for using bull's eye lanterns was the death penalty, because murderers could use them to paralyze their victims like a snake. The problem of fixing movement was therefore virulent long before photography, and the purpose of deploying bull's eye lanterns on the battleground was
70
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
not only to make friendly movement easier but also to make enemy movement impossible.
The lanterna magica, which was presumably the descendant of snch lanterns, was unfortunately faced with an entirely different problem. It was not supposed to make movement impossible, but rather to simulate it. While the camera obscura had helped to project images, even images of moving objects, the lanterna magica did the exact oppo- site. An image of the object was moved in front of the lens system and a mirrored light source produced an enlargement, which naturally seemed considerably more alive or threatening. There were reportedly projection mechanisms that could display (believe it or not) 12 images at once; where a single soldier had done his drill at the information source, 12 soldiers (as you can easily work out) performed their well-trained threatening gestures in step at the information sinks. The strategic techniques developed for bull's eye lanterns, which deployed naked light devoid of any specific form or shape, became imaginary techniques of control through the use of images or figures. With the exception of the more modern mirror or lens system, therefore, the lanterna magica is a reversal of,the camera obscura. That may be the reason why earlier historiantattributed its invention to the same Renaissance researchers to whom the camera obscura can also be traced back. But in the meantime, it has been proven that Giambat- tista della Porta did not have access to a functioning lanterna magica. Magic lanterns did not surface nntil a century later, in 1659, when their (in retrospect) unbelievable career began. There is a scientific- technical reason for this delay - like all optical media even today, they required the development of usable lens systems - and there is also a second reason, which is worth discussing. The second reason leads to magic and conjuring, and it delivers ns, like Goethe's Faust, from the dust of the lectern.
2. 2. 2 Implementation
It appears to be no accident that the development of the lanterna magica was not attributed to artists and painters, like the camera obscura, but rather to two mathematicians: besides the Dane Thomas Walgenstein, who reportedly demonstrated the self-printing of nature from the leaves of plants, as mentioned above, it was also attrib- uted to the great Dntch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Christian Huygens. Walgenstein presumably studied with Christian Huygens at the University of Leyden, which was famous at that time, and he reportedly said that he took a "bagatelle," which Huygens had
. ," ,,"
71
? OPTICAL MEDIA
not pursued any further, and made It effective and ready to go into production (Schmitz, 1981-95, p. 294). Indeed, Huygeus not only described the wave theory of light, without the knowledge of which televisions would not function, but he also made practical improve- ments to optical lens systems and built one of the first usable celestial telescopes. You can already guess the results of this arming of the eye with glasses and lenses, telescopes and microscopes in the seven- teenth century: the postulate of the visibility of all things collapsed under the evidence of the invisibly small under the microscope -like spermatozoa - and the invisibly large through the telescope -like the phases of Venus or the rings of Saturn. As we know, half of Pascal's philosophy was concerned with this, as well as the entire mathematics of differentials and integrals, which Leibniz invented while studying with Huygens of all people.
The impact of lens systems on everyday life also becomes evident when one realizes that in imperial Rome only one person had access - namely, the emperor himself, according to the near-sighted Nero - not to glasses, but rather to a piece of emerald, which was formed in such a way that it took the place of glasses at gladiator games. In short, it could be said that the baroque technology of lenses forced physical light itself, with its optical paths and refraction indexes, into the perspective that was invented only theoretically in the Renais- sance. Huygens did not deal with both reflection and refraction without reason in his Trait! ! de la lumiere, for optical media like the camera obscura and the lanterna magica implied a considerable increase in image definition: the primitive hole, which only prevented blurring in a negative way, namely by filtering, but could never become the ideal, namely an infinitely small hole, was replaced by the positive possibility of gathering and concentrating light. It was no wonder, therefore, that both these optical devices were applied on a massive scale following the development of lens systems, and they soon surfaced in such different areas as science, art, and religion, as well as in magic and folk entertainment.
2. 2. 3 Impact
2. 2. 3. 1 Propaganda
As in the case of the camera obscura, it is also only reasonahle not to attribute the mass application of the lanterna magica in the fol- lowing centuries simply to linear scientific-technical progress. It is important to note that the first reports of its deployment were not
72
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
for sCIentIfic purposes, but rather for the purpose of creatmg illu- SIOns. For example, the scientist Huygens reportedly refused to build a bagatelle like the lanterna magica for his father, who was a famous WrIter (Schmitz, 1981-95, p. 294), and his mathematics student Walgenstein reportedly employed the iante1'11a magica not to conduct research, but rather to spread fear and horror among his spectators by projecting death as a skeleton.
It was this ghostly use of the camera obscura that made careers m the followmg penod. Its deployment was logIcally first consIdered by writers who were scientifically mterested, but who were above all religious soldiers and CatholIcs, such as the JeSUIts Athanasius Kircher and Kaspar Schott and the Premonstrant monk Johann Zahn, who reportedly built hundreds of witch lanterns (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 51). The magic in the name of the device, which could feign things to the eyes that not only happened to be absent but could also never be present, like ghosts, thus likewise needs derivation.
To bring the matter into focus, I will limit myself to Kircher, who was also one of the most exciting figures of his time. Athanasius Kircher came from around the region of Fulda in Germany, joined the Jesuit Order when he was very young (as was customary), became a professor of philosophy and mathematics (a combination that was still possible or even typical at the time), left Germany during the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War, and ended up in Rome at the Vatican. Apparently, the Holy See decided at that time to avoid any scholarly scandals in the future, like Galileo or Giordano Bruno; in any case, Kircher rose to become a kind of scientific fire brigade for the Pope: with a special mandate and special clearance he was always present when there was new scientific territory to explore as well as defend in the name of the church. Kircher's publications ranged, logi- cally enough, from mathematical combinatorics to Greek mythology to the alleged decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He was a classical case of polyhistory, as it was called in the seventeenth century.
A hint concerning the magic of the lanterna magica and the purpose of its deployment can already be found in the title of the magnificent volume, in whose second edition in 1671 Athanasius Kircher pre- sented a sketch of the lanterna magica, although it was not entirely technically correct. The book is called Ars magna lucis et umbrae, the great art of light and shadow, which implies that the new optics was employed not as an instrument for scientific research but rather as an art. Among Kircher's arts, which clearly have nothing to do with Kant's aesthetics, two stand out: one military and one religious.
I'"
73
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
It was Kircher's hope that a modified form of the lanterna magica could revolutionize signalling or communications during wartime. The use of simple torches since the time of the Greeks had always given generals the greatest difficulties in transmitting orders that went beyond mere oppositions like yes and no, light and dark. In other words, they could not send coded alphabetical messages. However, Kircher proposed a concave mirror with written symbols correspond- ing to the order to be transmitted, whose letters could be blinded. The mirror could then be held in snnlight and an articulated message could be transmitted in this way over a distance of up to 12,000 feet or three and a half kilometers, without potential enemies within this distance having a chance of intercepting or actually hindering the transmission. Kircher's signal system project was thus called crypto- logia or stenographia - secret writing with light - more than a century
before Claude Chappe's optical telegraph.
As Liesegang's history of photography already noted, entertain-
ment media like the lanterna magica were not developed for entertain- ment purposes, but rather they were byproducts or waste products of pure military research. In the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles and Teflon pans, one would say spin-offs. It is also not surprising that Kircher belonged to the only order of monks that had and still has a general at its head. As Liesegang puts it, he was looking for a telegraph communication system that was supposed to guarantee perfectly secret commnnication between the members of a militant elite, and instead he popularized an optical medium of entertain- ment, and the more uninformed and greater in numbers its observers were, the more impressive or magical it seemed. The same transition from the telegraph to simulation, from the symbolic to the imagi- nary, will retnrn with Edison's invention of the phonograph and the
kinetoscope.
The logic of replacement or spin-off raises the qnestion as to
whether and how a strategic plan remains valid in the technology of the imaginary. To answer this question, Kircher's second, reli- gious artwork mnst be presented.
Namely, the Jesuit priest proposed a device that was the direct precursor of the zoetrope and must therefore be regarded as the direct precursor of film: the so-called "parastatic smicroscope" (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 56). As its name sug- gests, this device displayed or juxtaposed (those are the definitions of "parastatic") very small things, exactly like the microscope, and it consisted of a tnrntable and an optical observation facility. Small images were placed on the turntable, and enlargements could be seen through a lens system. Only Kircher's images were not simply
74
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
dancers and models that were able to turn around and move, like the images later used with the stroboscope in 1830, but rather they were the famous stations of the Passion of Jesus Christ, which had been established for centuries. These stations were earlier painted in spatial and temporal succession in churches or along the Way of the Cross, such as St. Ottilien, but Kircher began to reel them off at time-lapse speed and they began, if you will, to move. The Mount of Olives, Calvary, etc. as the first silent film in the historv of media . . .
The obvious question here must be why the seventeenth century did not denounce Kircher's suggestion as blasphemy, why it was per- mitted for the first time to show the central concept of the Christian message as a visual work of art, that is, as an illusion of a witch lantern.
The answer, I suspect, lies in the concept of optical transmission itself. Both of Kircher's proposals have a common goal: to send optical information and thus produce military or religious effects among the receivers.
2. 2. 3. 2 Heidegger's Age of the World Picture
There is also the question of what made the lanterna magica so attrac- tive for Jesuits of all people, but before I answer this question I want to make a short diversion into the realms of philosophy. As we know, in his late work Martin Heidegger attempted to think of the basic concept of European philosophy - being - as historically changeable despite all tradition. According to one of Heidegger's theses, being first constituted itself in the form of a representation (Vorstellung) in European modernity. Representational thinking delivered being as an object for a subject, which was not at all true for the Greeks and the Romans (Heidegger, 1977, pp. 132-3). A lecture on optical media can verify the facts of the case: it can be said, following Heidegger's line of thought, that linear perspective and the camera obscura were precisely the media of this representation.
In the next step in the history of being - in the philosophy of Descartes - the representation of the subject is re-presented to the subject once again as such: cogito ergo sum - I am because I can represent anything presented before me. As Descartes makes very clear, in the cogito the difference between day and night, waking and dreaming, reality and hallucination does not count. This also allows us to grasp the history of optical media more precisely: the technical device that re-presents representation itself (instead of reality) is of course the lanterna magica. The image of something - in other words,
,
,',I ,,, ,:'1
75
,' ,"
,,
,,,
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
its representation - is slid into the black box, and It is illnminated by a light that casts a representation of this representation, an image of this image, onto the wall. That concludes the history of being and my explanation of why the lanterna magica could not have come into existence until 100 years after the camera obscura.
2. 2. 3. 3 Jesuits and Optical Media
Bnt let us return from thinking back to theology. The camera obscura was directly linked to the letterpress. At least indirectly then, the camera obscura, linear perspective, and the Reformation went together - if for no other reason than because Luther's precept by which Protestant Christianity was founded on pure faith and pure writing could, on his own admission, not have been technically implemented without Gntenberg. You may have guessed, however, that this modern precept wonld not exactly be embraced by the one trne church. This is why the situation called for counter-measures to arm the old faith technically.
A short time before this, in 1622, Pope Gregor XV set up the con- gregatio de propaganda fidei in the Vatican: the association for the dissemination or propaganda of Catholic belief, which was the first propaganda agency in history. In the same year, the same pope can- onized the founder of the Jesuit Order. A few years later, the attempt to propagate linear perspective in Peking failed. No history of optical media should hide the fact that entertainment media are always also propaganda machines. But above all, there exists in every epoch of optical media good reason to name their strategic relationship to the enemy, that is, the written word. The only thing that occurs to Zglinicki concerning Kircher's smicroscope is the involuntarily comical sentence "we clearly see here once again the aim of the world
at that time to visualize the events with which one occupied oneself" (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 56), yet such tautologies must first be purged from a history of media war. Does the innocent "one" possibly have a darker proper name? What was the optical implementation of 6,
8, 14, or 36 Stations of the Cross about?
In at least half of Europe, the Reformation had abolished or
literally blackened medieval church rituals, with all of their visual glitter, and replaced them with the monochromatic, namely black- and-white mystery of printed letters. Sola scriptura, sola fidei - solely from writing and solely from belief. According to Luther, therefore, everyone should be able to be blessed without the worship of holy images and doing useful works for the church. Or, as King Crimson
76
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
sings: "Starless and bible black. " The rest of Europe had to take some action against this bible black, and it invented, as you know, the so-called Counter-Reformation, which meant above all religious pro- paganda and the Jesuit Order, to which lanterna magica practitioners Athanasius Kircher and Kaspar Schott belonged as well as the per- spective propagandist Father Schall.
The Jesuit Order was the work of a single man, who was not coincidentally a soldier by profession. Inigo Lopez de Recalde, later known as Loyola, was the SCIOn of a Basque sqUlredom, and in 1521 he defended Pamplona agamst the French. He thus fought in a fortress designed by those artist-engmeers, which was systematically destroyed by the cannons designed by the self-same artist-engineers. It so happened thata cannonball badly wounded Loyola's right leg, and bis prolonged recovery from this war wound turned into a reli- gious conversion. Loyola began (probably for the first time) to read books, consumed one holy legend after the other, became increasingly religious and eventually dedicated the tools of his trade - his weapons and armour - to the miracle-working image of the Virgin Mary in the monastery of Montserrat.
Fever and delirium, books and holy images - that was more or less the medial context from which the Jesuit Order emerged. The Exercitia spiritualia of holy Ignatius, the founding text of the order's founder, was already a book opposed to all books. For Loyola, spiri- tual exercises meant exercises for the soul as well as the body, which army reformers like Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, christened as drill practice around 1600 and which early twentieth-century film theorists eventually called psychotechnics. But unlike Luther and the couutless Protestant housefathers who went to Luther's school, these exercises did not consist of transcribing and reading the Bible or throwing the inkpot at the devil, should he want to disturb their writing work. For Loyola, who had been a soldier, drill practice had nothing at all to do with writing, and he only became interested in reading when he was a critically ill patient. At some point, the eyes of the founder of the Order or the eyes of those students who, according to him, were supposed to endure his spiritual exercises surely came across the letters of a religious book and noted, for example, what was written about hell. (In all Loyola commentaries, from James Joyce to Roland Barthes to myself, hell is naturally the dramatically preferred example, but in light of Athanasius Kircher's smicroscope the passion play could just as easily be used. ) When Loyola or one
of his Jesuit pupils locked himself in a monastic cell for weeks in order to meditate on hell, therefore, the intertwiued legends were
,"
77
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
actually involved, but not the book called the Bible. In other words, the scant information about hell, as it stands in the only true book of the Protestants, was always already overgrown and embellished by religious fantasies. For the Jesuit Order, it was logically important to visualize long and intensively everything that had once been read until it stopped being letter or text and began instead to overwhelm the five senses themselves. Let ns read what Loyola and his pupils did in the fifth exercise. The set topic read: A Meditation on Hell. Here is the run-through:
First heading. To see in imagination those enormous fires, and the souls, as it were, with bodies of fire.
Second heading. To hear in imagination the shrieks and groans and the blasphemous shouts against Christ OUf Lord and all the saints.
Third heading. To smell in imagination the fumes of sulfur and the stench of filth and corruption.
Fourth heading, To taste in imagination all the bitterness of tears and melancholy and a gnawing conscience.
Fifth heading. To feel in imagination the heat of the flames that play on and burn the [damned] souls. (Loyola, 1963, p. 36)
This means that only someone who had personally completed all these hellish spiritual exercises, like Loyola, could and would be permitted to join the Jesuit Order, and above all they must have imagined the torments of the damned Protestants in their hell-hole right up to their bitter end. It was thus almost too obvious what the Counter-Reformation had to offer in reply to the new Protestant medium of the letterpress: a theater of illusions for all five senses (although the sense of vision took absolute priority in all of the spiritual exercises) and a reading practice for readers who did not stick to the letter but rather experienced its meaning immediately as a sensual hallucination. In other words, the search for a medium that could combat Luther's Bible brought back the old religious images in a changed or improved form - no longer as icons or panels on a church wall, no longer as religious miniatures of the Acts of the Saints that even a child could comprehend, but rather as psychedelic visions that could motivate the soldiers of Christ, as the Jesuits called themselves, in the religious war much more effectively, and that means unconsciously, than the old-fashioned painted masterpieces. On the other hand, as you well know, with regard to even the most devout techniques resulting in ecstasy the established church in Rome has been and still is easily and justifiably suspicious of heresy. It is
78
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
therefore no wonder that in his early days in Spain Loyola landed in the prisons of the Inquisition several times. It is even less surpris- ing that at the last minute, which means after 1540, when the Pope ordered him to come from Spain to Rome in order to have his drills examined, Loyola made or rather had to make his spiritual exercises compatible with the old-fashioned worship of panels. The sixth and eighth rules of these Roman supplements read as follows:
We should approve of relics of the saints, showing reverence for them and praying to the saints themselves; visits to Station churches, pil- grimages, indulgences, jubilees, Crusade bulls, the lighting of candles in churches should all be commended [. . . J We should praise church decoration and architecture, as well as statues, which we should vener- ate in view of what they portray. (Loyola, 1963, pp. 120-1)
We thus come to the end of a short excursion into church history, and find ourselves back with the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher and his optical phase model of the Stations of the Cross - though not without shed- ding new light on the lanterna magica. Loyola's imperative "praise! " established a new kind of image worship, wbich, like the new hal- lucinatory readings, was not directed at the image, but rather at its meaning. It was a kind of image worship, therefore, that could not stand by and simply leave the outward appearance of churches or the Way of the Cross as the architects and painters had arranged them, but rather aimed at transferring the psychedelic effect of the spiritual exercises to the outside. "Outside" here refers to many possibilities: first, the outside of a real projection surface on which the inner image could appear, such as the harmless example of panel painting, or the exciting and innovative case of the lantema magica screen. Second, "outside" also refers to the outside beyond the Jesuit Order, a monas- tic elite whose members had worked over weeks and months with all possible mortifications of the flesh to actually achieve hallucinations. The Jesuits' task, to beat the Reformation's letterpress monopoly with more effective media technologies, was necessarily aimed at the conversion of the lay public, who through time constraints were not
expected to have performed spiritual exercises in the cloister. What Loyola had invented or enforced in his lonely cell had to become simplified, trivialized, mechanized, and mass applied. That is the entire difference between a spiritual exercise, in which Loyola hal- lucinated the Stations of the Cross, and an optical device called the smicroscope, with which Kircher showed rapidly changing images of these stations to the lay public, whom they wished to convert
'"
79
? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
through the precursors of film. The Counter-Reformation triumphed in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and half of southern Germany not only because of the millions of deaths caused by the Thirty Years' War, and therefore not only because of the dark or negative sides of power; it was just as much due to their bright and that means visual aspects, to a new kind of imaging.
This image technology is not only represented in the title of the second edition of Kircher's Ars magna lucis et umbrae, which does not promise to make scientIfic progress with light and shadow but rather to perform great arts. It can also be found in the illustration of a lanterna magica: one sees an oil lamp, and in front of the oil lamp is a horizontal row of painted glass plates that are all waiting to be shown and projected one after the other (almost like film) in the beam of light; but above all, one seeS on the dark facing wall the projection effect of the plate that currently lies in the oil lamp's beam of light: a naked man surrounded by waist-high flames. It would not be wrong to assume that these flames only signal to our modern eyes, which have been trained by McLuhan, that the message of every medium is the medium itself - in this case, tbe oil lamp - but among Kircher's contemporaries and audiences these flames meant something entirely different - namely, the flames of hell. In other words, thanks to the
lanterna magica the solitary hallucination of the founder of the Jesuit Order, who once concentrated all his five senses on imagining the agonies of hell, became technologically simulated for the masses. And the fate awaiting those who failed to find their way back to the only true faith immediately after the presentation was not simply the projected flames of hell. Kircher writes: "The images and shadows presented in dark rooms are much more frightening than those made by the sun. Through this art, godless people could easily be prevented from committing many vices / if the devil's image is cast onto the mirror and projected into a dark place. " (quoted in Ranke, 1982, p. 17). The fact that my source, Winfried Ranke, rejects the conclusion that "this was the beginning of a didactic and perhaps even missionary- indoctrinating deployment of the new demonstration device" (ibid. ), despite all of Schott's assurances about the many Jesuits engaged in lanterna magica experiments, is thus only evidence of blindness.
In our current mania over film and television, this strategy of effects may seem strange for a new optical medium, but it is necessary to realize that the first great entertainment media of the modern era, theater and literature, arose from a centuries-long war over religion and images. That goes for first-rate cultural performances, which are still retained in historical memory, as well as the lost performances
80
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
of travelmg players, who around 1900 were literally devoured and relegated to oblivion by the technical medium of film.
2. 2. 3. 4 Traveling Players
To start with the simpler category, because I don't need to know any-
thing about their origin and sociology, the so-called traveling players
always took up the escalations of the great religious war astonish-
mgly quickly and systematically. When Gutenberg and later Luther
appeared to triumph over the worship of images with their printed
books, the traveling players discovered the handbill as a medium
for reproducing their street ballads and illustrating them with wood
engravings. After the Counter-Reformation of hallucinated and pro-
jected images came to power, on the other hand, the traveling players
seem to have gone over to Kircher with all flags flying. In any case,
his smicroscope became the immediate precursor of all those peep
show cabinets that were admired at fairs on a massive scale up until
the nineteenth century. Peep show cabinets were small, transportable
devices for presenting images, which had one or two holes for the eyes
and which were often fastened to the backs of traveling entertainers.
For a modest fee, people were permirted to look into the box, just
as people later looked into the kinetoscope, the immediate precur-
sor of our cinema, and they were rewarded with images that could
be mechanically wound on one after the other. Refined models even
contained a miniature stage on which the scenery and the dramatic
figures could each be moved separately so that a rudimentary narra-
tive was allowed to develop. And when the peep show cabinets ran at "
the same speed as a mechanical music box, all that was missing was a technogenic process of storing images and it would have anticipated Edison's kinetoscope. The only obvious difference lay in the repre- sented narratives: while Edison naturally made his money with quint- essentially American boxing matches, the peep show cabinets stored in the Salzburg museum showed scenes from the holy story with Joseph, Mary, Jesus and the disciples. Loyalty to the Counter-Reformation and Jesuit propaganda could hardly be carried any further.
2. 2. 3. 5 Jesuit Churches
But the peep show cabinets displayed at fairs simultaneously also served as a model for what was supposed to be crucial for the elite public, or for court and city, as it was called at that time: the peep show theater. Unified perspectives, changeable backdrops, theater
81
'I: ,I
I I: I
",
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
hghting as 10 the small transportable peep show cabmets - everyth10g that had previously never existed in the theater. I name as the most necessary key words only the sun lighting of the Theater of Dionysus in Athens and the architecture of medieval mystery plays, which also took place outdoors and (like Dante's Divine Comedy) played on three stages or showed parallel narratives at the same time: above in heaven, below in hell and in between them on earth. Anglicists know better than I do how many elements of Shakespearean theater from 1600 were still in line with this old European theater, which was allegorical but for that reason also had no illUSIOns. But after St. Ignatius caught a glimpse of total hell through the art of meditation in his tiny cell in the cloister, and the Counter-Reformation of optical deception was under way, such simplicity was no longer enough. The same wave of innovation influenced both the interior architec- ture of churches and theaters. Namely, strictly following Lacan, it involved projecting pictorial linear perspective back into architecture again. What appeared to spectators and users in three-dimensional space should obey the same principles that Brunelleschi and Alberti had established for the two-dimensional space of the painting. And because the theater was employed as a church for the propaganda of faith, the church conversely also became a theater and the sacred
building was seized by this perspectivization of architecture.
One of the most important innovations of baroque architecture was the well-known use of trompe l'oeil paintings, which provided easy transitions between buildings and paintings, three-dimensional- ity and two-dimensionality; for the deceived eyes the ceiling paintings of heaven,. with all of their saints, became an integral part of the church and the perception of perspective. One becomes aware - and I will return to this later in my discussion of the image technolo- gies of the Romantic period - of the almost cinematic sex appeal of the saints, who, like Bernini's statue of St. Theresa of Avila, seem to be engaged in a love act with the angel of their hallucina- tions even though and precisely because they are part of the church
architecture.
As a matter of fact there is evidence - even if it is only later,
namely Romantic - that this new image technology of church space was connected to the lanterna magica. A story by E. T. A. Hoffmann with the distinctive title The Jesuit Church in Glogau, which just as distinctively comes from the first part of his Nachtstiicke (Night Pieces), can be traced back to his own experiences in the Silesian city of Glogau, where there actually was a large Jesuit church. Hoffmann
begins quite matter-of-factly:
82
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
JesUIt cloisters, colleges, and churches are built in that Italian style which is based on antique models, and prefers splendour and elegance to ecclesiastical solemnity. (Hoffmann, 1952, p. 70)
A Jesuit professor in the novella rationalizes this deviation from the Gothic, i. e. the supernatural, with the following explanation:
[T]he higher [supernatural] kingdom should indeed be recognized in
this world. But this recognition can be stimulated by symbols of joy, such as life offers, as does the spirit itself when it descends from that other kingdom into OUf earthly existence. OUf horne is there above; but so long as we dwell here, OUf kingdom is also of this world. (Hoffman, 1952, pp. 70-1)
The main character of the novella clarifies what is politically and
technologically meant by this very ambiguous explanation that the
Jesuit kingdom is also of this world. The hero is a painter from 1795
who is hired by the Jesuits in Glogau to restore the church. Because
I'
I ? ' I
? ? ?
? '
real marble is too expensive for the Jesuits, he is supposed to paint the ! I
columns of the church in such a way that it simulates the appearance of marble (Hoffmann, 1952, p. 71). One night, the sleepless narrator walks by the church - Hoffmann is after all narrating one of his night stories (Nachtstiicke) - to eavesdrop on the highly dramatic scene between a lanterna magica, a trompe l'oeil picture, and a technically remote-controlled painter:
[A]s I passed the Jesuit church, I was struck by a dazzling light stream-
ing through one window. The small side-door was ajar, and when I
walked in I saw a wax taper burning before a tall niche. On drawing ? ?
nearer I perceived that a packthread net had been stretched in front of this niche, and that a dark figure was climbing up and down a ladder, apparently engaged in making a design on the niche wall. It was Berthold, and he was carefully tracing the shadow of the net in black paint. On a tall easel beside the ladder stood the drawing of an altar. I was astonished at the ingenuity of the idea. If you have the slight- est acquaintance with the art of painting, you will know immediately what was the purpose of the net whose shadow Berthold was tracing on to the niche. He was going to paint an altar in apparent relief, and in order to get a correct enlargement of the small drawing he had, in the usual way, to put a net both over the sketch and over the surface on which the sketch was to be reproduced. But this surface was not flat; he was going to paint on a semicircular niche. His simple and ingenious contrivance, therefore, was the only possible way of obtain- ing a correspondence between the straight lines of the sketch and the
83
? ? ?