Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World
294
Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World
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| ISBN-13: | 9780226149035 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/08/1995 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 294 |
| File size: | 57 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Scenes from Deep Time
Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World
By Martin J. S. Rudwick
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1992 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-73104-9
CHAPTER 1
Creation and the Flood
Any scene from deep time embodies a fundamental problem: it must make visible what is really invisible. It must give us the illusion that we are witnesses to a scene that we cannot really see; more precisely, it must make us "virtual witnesses" to a scene that vanished long before there were any human beings to see it.
However, this problem is only slightly more acute than that faced by an artist depicting a historical scene in a similarly "realistic" style. Whether it comes from classical or biblical history — say, the Fall of Rome or the Fall of Babylon — the picture must make its viewers believe they are seeing a plausible representation of an event that neither they nor the artist have really witnessed at all. It must make them virtual witnesses of a scene that is reconstructed from the testimony of those who did see it. In the tradition of Western pictorial art, that testimony was overwhelmingly textual in character. Knowledge of material remains — for example, of the ruins of ancient Rome — could be used to supplement the texts; but the textual evidence from the classical or biblical authors remained paramount. What they reported in words was translated by the artist into visual terms, according to the pictorial conventions of the time and place in which the artist was working. What was judged to be a plausible or "realistic" representation was of course relative to those shared conventions.
It is hardly surprising that the earliest scenes that can be regarded in retrospect as being from "deep time" were firmly embedded in this artistic tradition of visual representations of scenes from the human past. In early modern Europe, scholars considered that the past history of the human race was recorded more or less fragmentarily in the chronicles of all literate societies. It was the task of the science of "chronology" to compare and evaluate these records critically, to correlate the various calendars by which they were dated, and to weld them all into a single universal history. However, the chronologers of the seventeenth century found their task increasingly difficult, as they penetrated back in time beyond the records of ancient Greece and its temporal equivalents elsewhere. By the time they reached the Flood or Deluge, of which they believed they could detect at least some obscure testimony in the records of many ancient cultures, one such record outshone all others by its apparent clarity and detail. Of course the biblical record would have been given some privileged status anyway, because of its overarching religious role in the culture of Christendom; but it is important to recognize that most seventeenth-century scholars considered that it also deserved special attention on account of its value as history.
For the time before the Deluge, the record became even more obscure, though here too the early chapters of Genesis seemed to provide at least a bare outline of "antediluvian" characters and events. Finally, or rather, for the beginning of all things, the chronologers had to rely on the biblical narrative of Creation itself. By its very nature this could not be regarded as a human record of events, since even Adam had not been there to witness them until the sixth day of Creation. But the veracity of the record was only enhanced by its putatively divine origin.
This image of a world of limited time, in which Creation itself was not more than a few thousand years distant, was simply a part of taken-for-granted reality in early modern Europe. Like its spatial or astronomical counterpart, the "closed world" of the Ptolemaic cosmos, it was not adopted for reasons of religious prejudice, still less expressed in order to avoid ecclesiastical censorship. It embodied the generally agreed, apparently common-sense view of the world.
It was within this image of the world's history that the first scenes from relatively deep time came to be designed. In Western religious art, there was a longstanding tradition of depicting episodes such as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark riding out the Flood, as early scenes within much longer sequences. In stained-glass windows or in tempera wall paintings, such cycles sought to represent visually, and thereby to make more accessible and persuasive, the Christian interpretation of cosmic history — all the way from the Creation recorded in Genesis, through the pivotal events of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ recorded in the Gospels, to the final Judgment foreshadowed in the Apocalypse. Traced from the medieval centuries into the art of the Renaissance and later periods, the pictorial conventions changed dramatically, but the program remained much the same. More significant was the invention of printing, especially the concurrent development of print-making, first in the form of woodcuts and later as copper engravings. This made such pictorial cycles far more widely available: they could now be studied at home, at least in more affluent homes, within the covers of a book, rather than being seen only in the local church, or on a lifetime's pilgrimage to some more distant and more distinguished site.
For the purposes of this book, it is convenient to begin with a relatively late example of such cycles. The one chosen here is particularly appropriate, because it was masterminded by a man who was also a distinguished naturalist, and who possessed one of the finest collections of fossils in early eighteenth-century Europe. Johann Jacob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) was trained as a physician and spent most of his life in his native city of Zurich in a variety of positions that would now be regarded as broadly scientific. He traveled extensively in the Swiss Alps, at a time when exploring the more remote parts was still a hazardous undertaking, and he published voluminous works on the natural history of Switzerland. Like many naturalists at this time, he also had major interests in human history; and he published a history of his native country and edited a collection of relevant historical documents.
Those two areas of interest — natural history and civil history — came together in his work on fossils. For like many of his contemporaries, Scheuchzer believed that fossils were relics of the Deluge. They recorded the natural history of the country before the Deluge, but they also provided uniquely persuasive evidence for the reality of that distant historical event. Scheuchzer's Herbarium of the Deluge Herbarium Diluvianum, 1709) depicted the wide range of fossil plants in his own collection, in a way that made it a valuable reference work long after his "diluvial" interpretation had been abandoned. Puzzled by the total absence of human fossils, he later seized on a newly discovered specimen as being indeed that of "a man who was a witness of the Deluge" (Homo Diluvii testis; 1726); he did not live to witness its much later identification as a large amphibian!
Scheuchzer's scenes from near the beginning of time — as he and most of his contemporaries conceived it — were published in his last and largest work, Sacred Physics Physica sacra, 1731–33). They came at the start of the sumptuous folio volumes, which were published in both Latin and French, the older and the newer international languages of science and scholarship, as well as in German, Scheuchzer's native language. Scheuchzer's work thereby became widely known throughout the literate world. The word "physics" still bore its old Aristotelian meaning and was not far from the modern sense of "science." The work was "sacred" physics, because it sought to illustrate the biblical narrative from ancillary evidence drawn from the best science of the day. It was a massive undertaking. There were no fewer than 745 full-page copper engravings; indeed the German edition was even entitled Copper Bible (Kupfer-Bibel), in order to emphasize its illustrations. They were drawn by a team of eighteen engravers under the direction of the imperial engraver Johann Andreas Pfeffel (1674–1748), whose name was rightly given as much prominence on the title page as Scheuchzer's. Other artists had special responsibility for the design of the elaborate baroque frames for the scenes, and even for the lettering of the captions.
The overwhelming majority of Scheuchzer's scenes illustrate episodes from biblical history, stretching from beginning to end, from Genesis to the Apocalypse. Just as the Creation narrative was regarded as a brief prelude to the main — human — story of the world, so likewise the engravings that illustrate the Creation (and the later Deluge), several of which are reproduced here, come just from the start of a far longer sequence of scenes, covering in principle the whole of human history.
Unlike the literalism of modern fundamentalists, with their deliberate rejection of biblical scholarship, Scheuchzer's superficially similar interpretation of the earliest chapters of the Bible reflects a mainstream tradition that in his day still embodied good plain sense. A more historical understanding of Hebraic language and imagery, theology and cosmology, as represented in early work on biblical criticism, had not yet spread widely even in scholarly circles. Scheuchzer and most of his contemporaries saw no difficulty in assuming that the Creation and the Deluge had taken place just as and when a literal reading of the texts suggested. That assumption is reflected visually in the engravings that he and Pfeffel designed to illustrate some scenes from the deepest time they could imagine.
The most important feature of the scenes that illustrate the Creation narrative is that they form a sequence that leads from initial chaos to a completed and human world. The various components of the natural world, finally including mankind too, are brought in turn onto the stage on which the drama of human redemption is to be played out. However, although Scheuchzer himself uses the traditional metaphor of the "theatre of the world" (see text 4), the elaborate decorative frames to these scenes suggest even more forcefully that they were to be viewed as a sequence of pictures, set out as if along the walls of a gallery, although in fact between the covers of a book.
The first pictures, of initial chaos and the creation of light, are depicted from a cosmic, not a terrestrial viewpoint — perhaps a divine view, but in any case certainly not a human one. The selection reproduced here thus starts with two scenes from the third day of Creation (figs. 1, 2; text 1). They illustrate the world just before and just after the creation of plant life. Before, the world is bare and ugly, yet also like a well-tilled plant nursery, ready and able to sustain a fertile world of plants. After, it is lush, beautiful, and full of color. Yet — as Scheuchzer is careful to add, in order to counter any suggestion of materialism — it is not the soil itself that has the power to produce all these varied plants, but God alone.
That same point is made in the text that explains the scenes illustrating the work of the fifth day of Creation (figs. 3, 4; text 2). As was usual among naturalists at the time, Scheuchzer sees in the diversity and marvelous adaptations of marine animals the primary evidence that they owe their existence to God's creative action rather than to any intrinsic power of the material elements. In the scene depicting fish and whales (fig. 3), the border is decorated with specimens of fish as if in an exhibit; in the scene with shellfish (fig. 4), the shells are likewise shown on land, stuck to a decorative arch of rock, rather than in their positions of life. Although such scenes purport to show episodes from the work of Creation in the deep past, their design reveals that they are just as much — or even more — a survey of the diversity of nature in the present, as it might be displayed in a museum.
With the sixth day of Creation (fig. 5; text 3), quadrupeds are added to the diversity of the world; or, equally, Scheuchzer's museumlike survey moves further up the traditional "scale of beings" toward man. The scene showing all these animals (others are depicted on another engraving not reproduced here) is drawn in a style that already had a long artistic history, one that continues to influence the genre of scenes from deep time today. The animals pose in a kind of tableau; one of each kind, hardly in interaction with each other or with their background of plant life. It is a scene of Arcadia, or of the Garden of Eden, lacking only the human presence.
That presence is provided in the scene that immediately follows (fig. 6; text 4). As Scheuchzer explains, all is now ready and prepared for the principal character to come on stage, for the host to sit down at table. All the previous phases of Creation have been merely preparatory to the coming of humanity in the person of Adam, who sits in the Garden of Eden, surrounded by the creatures he has been set there to rule, and gazing upward with awe toward the divine source of his unique nature and authority. But the illustrations decorating (if that is the right word!) the frame of the scene remind the viewer of man's complex fetal development, which, like the complexity of animal structure, is a sign of man's status as a merely created being, and perhaps also of his mortality.
There is nothing particularly original about the designs that Scheuchzer and Pfeffel devised to illustrate the Creation narrative. On the contrary, they drew on a rich artistic tradition of similar images. Their sequence is reproduced here simply because it is representative of its time, and because it was widely known and admired. As this book will show, scenes like Scheuchzer's became in turn an important pictorial precedent for those based on a new source of "testimony" about the deep past, namely, fossils. This was a source that Scheuchzer never considered, because he regarded fossils as invaluable witnesses to another and later moment in relatively deep time.
After his scenes from the days of Creation, Scheuchzer's sequence moves on in traditional fashion through the drama of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and onward to Noah's building of the Ark and the coming of the Flood. The former gives him an excuse for illustrating fig leaves, serpents, and thorns; the latter, for displaying a wide range of fossils interpreted as relics of the Deluge. That interpretation also appears on the margins of one of his depictions of the Deluge (fig. 7; text 5). Here the door of the Ark is closed, ready to embark; would-be passengers without reserved seats are left stranded on land soon to be submerged. In the frame of the scene are specimens of the fossils that, Scheuchzer believed, confirmed the exact season of the event. The connection between Deluge and fossils is in fact made more clearly in the small engraving that decorated the title page of Scheuchzer's earlier Herbarium of the Deluge (fig. 8). Here the Ark is seen riding on the subsiding waters of the Deluge, leaving some shells stranded on the shore in the foreground, ready to be preserved as fossils.
In the long run, however, Scheuchzer's assumption that all fossils originated at the Deluge was less important than his emphasis on their status as witnesses to a past event. To make this point, Scheuchzer borrowed the authority of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, quoting from a review of his own book, which had used the already commonplace analogy between fossils and the coins or medals of Greece and Rome (text 5). Just as the evidence of coins could supplement textual records in the reconstruction of the classical world, so fossils could supplement the still more scanty human records of the earliest periods of human history. That they might act as "testimony" to periods even deeper in time was not a possibility that would have occurred to Scheuchzer, or to most of his contemporaries, simply because they saw no reason to believe that time itself was significantly deeper than mankind.
During the later part of the eighteenth century, however, that possibility could no longer be ignored, at least by the naturalists who explored the thick piles of rock strata to be seen in sea-cliffs and mountainsides, and who collected distinctive sets of fossils from them, without ever finding any trace of human remains. These naturalists were understandably hesitant about putting any figure to the magnitude of time that might have been involved, because there was little on which to base any such conjecture. But the suspicion that man was a latecomer in a vastly older history of the world grew slowly to a near certainty. The book Epochs of Nature (Les époques de la nature, 1778), by the great French naturalist Georges, Count Buffon (1707–88), was particularly influential in this respect, even though it quickly became outdated in empirical terms. Buffon sketched a vast panorama of earth history divided into seven epochs — echoing or parodying the "days" of the Genesis narrative — in which mankind appeared only in the seventh and last. Deeply prehuman time became for the first time conceivable.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J. S. Rudwick. Copyright © 1992 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction1. Creation and the Flood
2. Keyholes into the Past
3. Monsters of the Ancient World
4. A First Sequence of Scenes
5. Domesticating the Monsters
6. The Genre Established
7. Making Sense of It All
Notes
Sources for Figures and Texts
Bibliography
Index