Miraculous Birds

Rudolf Wittkower offers the following English translation of the Bird and Serpent text which accompanies many copies of the Great Stemma. It seems worth bringing it online in a searchable, copiable format:

It is maintained that there is a bird in a country of the Orient which, armed with a large and very sharp beak, provokes the snake which he wants to fight with audacious hissing. He covers himself purposely with dirt and also covers the pearls of different colours with which nature has lavishly adorned him. Having thus given himself an insignificant appearance he surprises the enemy by this unfamiliar impression and deceives him, so to speak, by the security which the latter feels in front of his shabby appearance. Holding his tail as a shield in the manner of a warrior before his face, he boldly attacks the head of his furious adversary, pierces the brain of the surprised beast with the unexpected weapon of his beak and thus kills his monstrous enemy by his marvellous intelligence.
Christ girded himself with human weakness and enveloped himself with the dirt of our flesh to fight in the shape of man for the benefit of salvation and to deceive the godless deceiver with pious fraud, and he concealed his former shape with the latter, throwing, as it were, the tail of his humanity before the face of divinity, and extinguished as if with a strong beak the poisonous malice of the old murderer of men through the word of his mouth. Therefore the Apostle says: Through the word of his mouth he will kill the wicked.

From: Rudolph Wittkower. 'Miraculous Birds.' Journal of the Warburg Institute (1938), Volume 1, Issue 3, pages 253-257. DOI: 10.2307/750013 http://www.jstor.org/stable/750013. Wittkower probably intended the last phrase to be "the sword of his mouth," but this has been spoiled by an officious proof-reader. The biblical text referred to is Revelation 2:16.

The text has a French translation in: Bord, Lucien-Jean, and Piotr Skubiszewski. L’image de Babylone aux serpents dans les Beatus: Contribution à l’étude des influences du Proche-Orient antique dans l’art du haut Moyen Age. Paris: Cariscript, 2000.

Wittkower and Neuss located the image in five Beatus manuscripts: three of them alongside Alpha recensions of the Great Stemma (Gerona, Turin, Manchester). The others were Urgell (Gamma) and Saint-Sever (Sigma). The image, without the text, is also found near a Great Stemma, in a biblical Delta manuscript, the San Millàn Bible, spread across two pages.

The Rylands version of the image in Manchester is online. Moleiro has a watermarked version of the Gerona image online. The French website Encylopedie Universelle reproduces a detail of the same (about 975, folio 18v). It also has a relatively large image from the Saint-Sever Beatus (about 1060, folio 13). Turin and Urgell are not imaged online as far as I know.

The Latin, as transcribed by Wilhelm Neuss, is as follows:

Quedam esse avis in regione orietentalis asseritur, quae grandi et perduro armatoque rostro contra draconem quem audacibus lacessit sibilis pugnaturam coenum de industria expetit, e cuius volutabro teiro habitu infecta sordescit et diversorum gernmas colorum quibus eam indulgentiam natura depinxit. Et humili despecta vestitu ita hostem novitate deterreat et quasi vilitatis suae securitate decipiat. Caudam velut scutum ante faciem suam quadam arte bellatoris opponit audaci impetu in capud adversarii furentis adsurgit, improviso oris sui telo stupentis bestiae cerebrum fodit, et sic mirae calliditatis ingenio immanem prosternit inimicum.
Informa hominis pugnaturus ad militiam salutis publicae humana se infirmitate praecinxit ac luto se nostrae carnis involvit ut impium deceptorem pia fraude deciperet, et postremis priora celavit ac velut caudam humanitatis ante faciem divinitatis objecit, et tamquam rostro fortissimo venenatam veteris homicidae malitiam verbo sui oris extinxit. Unde et apostolus dicit: verbo oris sui interficiet impium.

Office Buildings

I have already described my presentation in Berlin on August 18 to the German chapter of the Society for News Design (report).

It was curious that my host there brought along some images of extremely disciplined trees: persons represented by rectangles, each generation rigidly parked in its own storey, rather like an office building. This fierce axial character contrasts with the much looser attitude to space of the Great Stemma author. Late Antique stemmata are really about paths through space, and are not at all like grids.

Stemma, Maps and Matrices

Now that we have the Great Stemma published online, it's a good time to consider what sort of commonalities it has with the "arbor juris" diagrams in Isidore's Etymologies and with the Peutinger Map. The most important observation is that all three are in a sense calques of the board game, where the meaning arises from traversing through the diagram, much as you jump a counter over the squares or circles of a board towards a goal.

As an itinerarium, Peutinger is all about paths and distances, and not at all about spatial arrangements. One might argue that this is an adaptation to fit its roll form, but I wonder if this isn't a kind of deliberate elaboration from what would be needed for a mere map into something more sophisticated. As it happens, today's IHT edition of the New York Times reports on an ingenious new way of representing cities that overlaps a perspective view into a bird's eye view. It was designed by London's Berg studio and is an exhibit at the NY Museum of Modern Art. The Peutinger Map may not be a broken or primitive map, but instead a highly sophisticated meta-map like the Berg one (I won't comment here on the Richard Talbert proposal that the map is more show-off than practical).

One could argue that the common feature of Peutinger, the arbor iuris, the Great Stemma and also items such as the arbor porphyriana is the invitation to the reader to discover and explore paths, usually crooked paths. That is what the fila and the hypothetical timeline of the Great Stemma are about. The open question is about how accurately the fila and timeline were aligned with one another.

One important ancillary point, to my mind, is that our knowledge of all these graphic schemes is diminished by the difficulty that every scribe, whether Antique or medieval, must have had in accurately copying technical drawings by hand. Last year, I copied the triangular version of the "arbor iuris" and found it a very tricky task, even with good graphics software to help me.

Practice at copying these ingenious graphics has been helpful in understanding their transmission. When I am looking at a poor copy of a drawing, I now assume that its predecessor was more observant of the regularities generally. The more accurate predecessors of these drawings might have had a lot more fine-scale axial information, which is the easiest feature to get out of alignment, as we also seen in the Eusebian Chronological Canons.

But we cannot even begin to reverse this degradation unless we know what equipment such a copyist used when reproducing such drawings, and there I am afraid I have not read enough research. My understanding is that desks were uncommon: according to Kurt Weitzmann, texts were commonly copied onto papyrus rolls by a scribe sitting tailor-style, wearing a tight skirt as the support for his papyrus, which was laid obliquely over the left knee. In the early codex period, the folios were also inscribed on two knees (at least that is true of the Spanish monastery depicted in one of the Beatus codices). It seems to me that big graphics like the Great Stemma could not be competently copied that way, especially if straight axes had to be preserved. I have not studied how paintings were reproduced, but would guess that this done on tables or easels, since the artist had to be at some distance from his canvas to wield his brush.

When we consider how a pen-drawing was copied, I can only speculate. My guess would be that this was a job for a specialist. A tracing through translucent "paper" of some nature? Hardly likely, as the customer would surely expect a product on a robust support. In the 19th century, technical draftsmen used technology such as pantagraphs, but I doubt if these were known in Late Antiquity.

Again, I am only guessing, but I would suppose that the most efficient method would be to stretch a net over the source, another net over the destination, and plot each square or hexagon from one to the other. If a non-specialist scribe were given the task, he might not have the equipment, or the training, or the wit, or the time to do this. If he were particularly incompetent, he would not even complete each panel left to right but might simply hurl squiggles on the page to represent his "overall impression" of the model, then fill the gaps. The Urgell Beatus version of the Great Stemma exemplifies that sort of chaotic, ill-planned copy. It is hardly surprising that we have rather little of the pen-drawings of Antiquity.

Now, I think this encourages us to contemplate the question of Antique "technical" drawing with more attention to the intelligence behind each drawing than to the deficiencies in execution of any of its copies (this was my criticism of Klapisch-Zuber). To some extent, we may be able to at least discover the right questions to ask by looking at collective memory, the practices in other periods, and even our own perceptions. The answers to those questions naturally depend on evidence, but we should try to connect to the intelligence or the intention of the Antique authors.

Infographics Meeting

I did a presentation on Thursday to a monthly meeting of the Society for News Design in Berlin, and there is a short note on it here by Dagmar Gehl, a PhD candidate at the University of Trier who has been completing a thesis on how adequately people understand "multimodal print clusters" (that is, graphics and text).
The questions fom the listeners as I went along were helpful in showing what audiences find surprising about this material.
One immediate question was: why there were so few daughters in the "family tree of Christ"? The answer: the Great Stemma author, working circa 420 A.D., is faithfully reproducing material that was nearly 1,000 years old in his own time. So the heavily male bias merely reflects the bias of the material he was given. The 540 names in the Great Stemma are certainly a selection from two or three times as many biblical names, but gender is not a factor in the selection.
Other questions focussed on why people wanted to construct genealogies in the first place, or how "true" they are. That is such a wide question that I usually steer away from discussing it, since I would like my audiences to focus more on the "how" of producing a flow chart, or organization chart, or dendrogram, or family tree, and why the visualization can be more useful as a communication medium than a text. But of course it can be legitimately discussed, and I do intend to broach the wider issue in the book I am writing about the research.

Oxford Patristics Conference

I've done the presentation at last of the Great Stemma, to a qualified audience at the Oxford Patristics Conference today, followed by fruitful chats with three leading professors with close knowledge of the issues it raises. There were about 50 people at the session. After all these years of speaking, it still feels a bit strange to have an audience staring at you, seemingly unresponsive, though they are actually busy mentally processing what you say. They were great, and it was a kind of out-of-nowhere topic. Conference participants who had been told about it in advance were prepared, and said encouraging things afterwards. There was even a little murmer of laughter when I suggested the Great Stemma was like a PowerPoint slide. Thanks for being a great audience!

Liber Genealogus Text

Just in time for the Oxford Patristics Conference, I have completed a new, structured edition of the Liber Genealogus and published it online here: www.piggin.net/stemmahist/libertext.htm.
Last summer I wasted a couple of weeks marking up a different recension of the Liber, that of Turin, in the mistaken belief that it was the earliest. This time I seem to have tracked down the recension that is truly the first, that of St Gall. It contains a subscription indicating it was written in 427 CE. I have keyed the transcript to the pages of the St Gall manuscript (I will make these hotlinks when it comes online). The manuscript page numbers begin with 299 (this particular codex is numbered by pages, not by folios). I have placed the etymological glosses in a column of their own at the right, which helps to make clearer how the author worked as he read his data from the Great Stemma diagram. The numbering is Mommsen's. It breaks the text into sections of wildly varying size, and I find it illogical, but it has been established as authoritative. Perhaps we can devise a better numbering system in the future.

Oxford Patristics Conference

Here is the Oxford Patristics Conference web announcement of my paper to be delivered August 11: The Great Stemma: A Late Antique diagram of Christ's descent from Adam. They have put me in Room 10 at the Examination Rooms among the communications taking place on the Thursday on Art. I'm looking forward to it a lot.