“You will exhibit the most delightful trick,” an assistant to Kircher later wrote, “if you impose one of these appearances on a live cat, as Fr. Kircher has done. While the cat sees himself to be surrounded by an innumerable multitude of catoptric cats . . . it can hardly be said how many capers will be exhibited in that theatre, while he sometimes tries to follow the other cats, sometimes to entice them with his tail, sometimes attempts a kiss, and indeed tries to break through the obstacles in every way with his claws so that he can be united with them.”
A magic lantern
Evelyn didn’t mention any cats in his diary (or any capers), but by the early 1640s, Kircher’s interest in mirrors, reflection, and optics had only intensified. There is evidence that during this period he began to entertain, or frighten, his visitors with a primitive type of magic lantern, projecting images of Satan and death onto the walls of his darkened cubiculum. He is also known to have dissected the eyeballs of bulls in order to understand the way vision works. All these activities informed the production of his next book, The Great Art of Light and Shadow.
The title in Latin, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, was intended as a play on words: “We say ‘Magna’ on account of a kind of hidden allusion to the magnet,” Kircher wrote in his introductory pages, meaning that the title could also be read as “The Magnetic Art of Light and Shadow.” He’d begun to see everything in more or less magnetic, almost binary, terms: attraction and repulsion, positive and negative, friendship and strife, light and dark. To Kircher the connection between light and magnetism seemed clear; it was the magnetic attraction of the sun’s rays, after all, that made the sunflower turn toward it—and that, at least in theory, might make a sunflower seed turn toward it too.
Like The Magnet, this book was conceived as an encyclopedic work, an “encirclement” of the entirety of its subject, one that in almost a thousand pages, plus dozens of engravings, diagrams, maps, and illustrations, would provide readers with all they could possibly want to know about light, color, vision, and related matters. It also provided some impressive evidence of mystical erudition. The book’s ten-part structure, as Kircher explained it, connected to the ten-stringed harmony of the Greek instrument the decachord. This in turn represented the well-ordered harmony of nature, and the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, and the Pythagorean notion of the number ten as the number of the universe and perfection, as well as the Sefirot, the ten emanations of God, by which, according to Kabbalah, the universe was created. “For just as the wise men of the Hebrews claim a world built from ten rays of divinity,” Kircher wrote in his preface, “so we completed ten separate themes or books, as it were, ten books in ten parted rays, the world of light and shadow, that is, our art.”
Kircher wrote like Hermes Trismegistus himself when it came to describing God’s purpose with respect to the sun: “He has established the Sun, I claim, as a kind of heart or soul, or a sort of intelligence and, I may also say, as the principal control and will of nature, in order that the world be governed by it, and that in order that the hidden sacraments of God’s wisdom be revealed torn out of the chaos and abyss of darkness, and in order that, from the latter visible and material will, the majesty of the former invisible super-mundane will become known to mortals.”
The book devoted hundreds of pages to sundials, and to Kircher’s own theories about fireflies (they appear to have voluntary control of their flashes), chameleons (they stop changing color once they are dead), and phosphorescent jellyfish (they’ve simply been endowed with the ability to produce light so that they can see in the darkness of deep water). It provided readers with a calculation of the “thickness of the atmosphere”—forty-three thousand paces—undertaken by measuring “the refraction of sunlight in air,” and offered advice to artists on perspective as well as “rules which must be followed in painting scenes and drawing pictures.” There were musings on the color of angels, and on why the sky is blue: in order to provide a proper visual background for everything, it had to be “a kind of unequal mixture of light and dark,” and, after all, blue is “a color by which the uninterrupted sight may contemplate that most agreeable space of the heavens.”
Among other information on optical curiosities and devices, The Great Art of Light and Shadow significantly included one of the earliest published descriptions of a microscope. (Della Porta described magnifying lenses in Natural Magic, and Galileo wrote about the use of a telescope “adjusted” to see things close up. He’d made a gift of one to the experiment-minded members of the Accademia dei Lincei, or Academy of the Lynx-Eyed in Rome, who in turn had published descriptions and images of magnified bees. The Linceans, as they were called, may have been the source of Kircher’s device.) Although Kircher’s smicroscopus was not much more than a short tube with a magnifying lens, or lenses, inside it, he claimed to have seen “mites that suggested hairy bears” and minute organisms in cheese, vinegar, and milk. If the worm-like forms that can be seen through a microscope are “so tiny that they are beyond the reach of the senses,” he wondered later, “how tiny can their little hearts be? How tiny must their little livers be, or their little stomachs, their cartilage and little nerves, their means of locomotion?”
But Kircher wasn’t very accurate when it came to optical specifications for others to follow, and there’s doubt about his technical expertise. In 1645, after he sent some kind of image-projection assembly to the emperor in Vienna, a Jesuit in the court wrote him twice for more precise instructions because he couldn’t get it to work. Years later an Englishman reported that “an eminent man of optics” in Nuremberg “spoke bitterly to me against Father Kercherius, a Jesuit at Rome . . . saying that it had cost him above a thousand pounds to put his optic speculations in practice, but he found his principles false, and showed me a great basket of glasses of his failings.”
Meanwhile, a Minim friar named Emmanuel Maignan complained in correspondence that Athanasius’s work on catoptrics was a little too similar to his own. And after the censors approved the text of Light and Shadow, a satiric work called Monarchy of the Solipsists began circulating around Rome. Written by an obviously fictitious author, Lucius Cornelius Europeaus, the pamphlet made fun of the Jesuits of the Collegio Romano, and of Kircher, depicting him as an “Egyptian wanderer” who “broadcasts trifles about the Moon.” The “Solipsists” consider theological questions, such as “whether the souls of the Gods have color,” as well as philosophical questions, such as:
If a mouse urinates in the sea, is there a risk of shipwreck?
Are mathematical points receptacles for spirits?
Is a belch an exhalation of the soul?
But overall, the response to Kircher’s magnificent illustrated compendium was positive, and so was the way in which Jesuit authorities believed his prodigious intellectual output reflected on the order and on the Church. Pretty soon they relieved him of his teaching duties, not to keep students safe from the work of this Egyptian wanderer, but to free him to do more of it.
—
KIRCHER NOW SHIFTED his attention from the entirety of optics to the entirety of acoustics and sound. Or rather, as he later wrote, there was a “desire of joining to our work on Optics a work on Acoustic faculties with like variety and opulence of evidence.” The reason was simple: “I discovered so great a mutual affinity between the two that I have concluded that light is nothing other than a certain consono-dissonance for the eyes, while sound . . . is a certain shadow-light for the ears.”
In the course of producing his next massive tome, Musurgia Universalis sive Ars Magna Consoni et Dissoni (Universal Music-making, or The Great Art of Consonance and Dissonance), Kircher studied the ears and the vocal organs of humans, animals, and birds, and began cataloging the history of musical instruments and musical styles. He also joined with a craftsman named Matteo Marione to replace the old water-powered organ in the gardens of the Palazzo Quirinale. And he started experimenting with what he cal
led “tone architecture”—“the reflection of sounds and the multiplication of the same.”
Guided by the “great similitude of light and sound,” he applied his (as it turned out, incorrect) understanding of reflected light to the reflection of sound. After a number of trials, Kircher developed “a conical tube, or, if you will, one projected into a spindle,” that seemed to carry sound better than other designs. He subsequently installed a very large version of one of these tubes—“joined with iron sheets about twenty-two palms in length”—in the wall between his cubiculum on the second floor of the Collegio and the interior gate facing a garden downstairs.
“Should need arise for our porters to inform me of some matter,” he explained, “whether concerning the arrival of some visitors or any other affair, instead of taking the trouble to reach my [quarters] through the various labyrinthine windings of the house, they would speak to me while standing within the security gate, as I lingered in the remote recess of my bed chamber, and, as if present, they reported distinctly and clearly to me whatever they might wish; and I, in turn, was responding to the matter with the same tone of voice through the mouthpiece of the tube.”
It also came in handy as an eavesdropping device. “I daresay that no one in the garden was able to say anything in a voice above a whisper that I did not hear within my bed chamber,” he recalled.
Among hundreds of other acoustical innovations and musical machines included in Universal Music-making, eventually published in 1650, the book described the glass harp (goblets arranged by the level of liquid within them, played by passing a moistened finger around the rims) and the Aeolian or wind harp (a box-shaped stringed instrument placed in a window and played by the breeze). One instrument that doesn’t seem to have been included—at least no one can find it in the twelve hundred pages of Latin that make up the two-volume work—is the infamous cat piano with which Kircher has so long been associated. But Kaspar Schott, his friend and disciple from Würzburg, did publish an account of it. Schott wrote that a “distinguished and ingenious” person, who sounds like Kircher, constructed one of these pianos to dispel the melancholy of an unnamed prince, who sounds a bit like the Prince-Elector of Mainz. This person
captured living cats, all of differing size and consequently of differing shrillness and depth of voice; these, in a certain chest constructed with effort devoted to this purpose, he enclosed in such a way that their tails, after they had been stretched through apertures, were fastened and led through to certain determined channels. Upon these he furnished keys constructed with most slender pricks in the place of mallets. . . . In proportion to their differing tonal magnitude he arranged the cats so that individual keys corresponded to their individual tails and he established the instrument in a place suitable for the relaxation of the Prince. When it was finally played, it produced the sort of harmony as the voices of cats are wont to supply. For when the keys had been depressed by the fingers of the Organist, since with their very pricks they punctured their tails, the cats, driven to a state of madness, thundering with piteous voice now deep, now shrill, were producing a harmony arranged from the voice of cats, which thing both moved men to laughter and was able even to drive the mice themselves to the fields.
Kircher was not really a musician; he played no instrument, feline or otherwise, but he was an opinionated aficionado of music at a time and place, baroque Rome, of extraordinary musical activity—not only the opera, but orchestration, and the trombone, for example, were new. As a mathematician with training in the ancient study of harmonics, he had little patience for what he heard in the churches, chambers, and theaters by composers and singers who lacked rigor and grounding in musical intervals. Kircher conceded that “notable abuses and faults” were impossible to avoid “amid so great a throng of musicians.” Still, he bemoaned the situation in which “such wretched compositions, prone to so many errors and defects, should appear every day, often even in the leading places.” He also complained about hearing “the same twittering, the same cluckings, the same phrases everywhere until you feel sick and angry.”
The cat piano
As a partial solution to the problem, Kircher offered readers a do-it-yourself system for writing music according to proper mathematical rules. “The mechanical production of music,” he explained, “is nothing other than a certain closely defined method I have invented, by which anyone, even if he has no musical knowledge, may, by varied application of music-making tools, compose tunes.” It was a project that he’d been working on since his time in Würzburg with Schott. Based on the combination techniques of Ramon Llull—the same techniques he’d employed to make his strange calculating machine on Malta—the procedure was actually limited in scope to four-part polyphonic settings for voice. Nevertheless, an almost endless number of compositions could result from combining hundreds of short musical phrases in various styles and pitches, which Kircher represented as values on numerical tables. Kircher even used the elements of the system to build a number of music-computing cabinets for presentation as gifts to certain patrons and dignitaries. These “musarithmetic arks,” as he called them, were handsome wooden boxes containing many columns of long removable slats onto which the values had been imprinted; as the slats were pulled out, music was pieced together.
Most of the music theory and a lot of other material contained in Universal Music-making was actually lifted right from Marin Mersenne’s large work on music. (“Father Kircher devoured my book Harmonie Universelle that I lent him here in four days,” Mersenne wrote during a visit to Rome in 1645, “and says he is thrilled.”) But for readers, that only added to the value of this encyclopedia, which served as the standard musical text in Europe well into the eighteenth century.
Kircher’s original contributions to his own book are in fact well respected. In addition to creating new classifications of musical styles, Kircher was apparently the first to articulate the “doctrine of the affections” on which so much later baroque music operated. Kircher believed that music’s great purpose was to echo and evoke human emotions or affective states, but that this purpose was best achieved through formal rhetorical technique and structure. A German translation published in 1662 made Universal Music-making especially important in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, where, as the modern Italian composer Roman Vlad believes, it had “a more or less direct influence on Johann Sebastian Bach.”
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Four Rivers
Kircher’s success with magnetism, optics, and music was “grounds for praise of God,” but it also offered surprising “fodder for tribulation,” as he put it, and may have even brought about some paranoia. (The real reason for installing an eavesdropping device in his bedchamber?) Those who had always been skeptical of him, he recalled, “attacked me anew with fresh accusations.” The charge: He’d been concentrating on those other subjects because he wasn’t getting anywhere with his most important work, “as if abandoning all hope of addressing Hieroglyphics on account of its impenetrable difficulty.”
Kircher was now in his mid-forties, and it had been much more than a decade since he began trying to decipher the Egyptian system. In the meantime, his vision for Egyptian Oedipus had grown more and more ambitious, and more and more expensive to execute. It would have to be longer than he originally thought. Many exotic typefaces were required. More artists and engravers were needed to render the illustrations. Now, he said, God provided “an utterly marvelous manner” for him to resume his hieroglyphic work and to “elude the empty machinations” of his enemies. Events led not only to the publication of Egyptian Oedipus but to Kircher’s collaboration with Gianlorenzo Bernini on what many people regard as his masterpiece, the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Fountain of the Four Rivers) in the Piazza Navona, one of the most well-known public squares in the world.
In 1647, Pope Innocent X decided, “for the immortality of his own name,” as Kircher wrote, to re-erect an Egyptian obelisk in the center of
the piazza, which occupies the oblong site of the old Circus Agonalis, a stadium where ancient Roman games were held. Innocent and other members of the Pamphilj family—including his powerful sister-in-law, Donna Olimpia, called the papessa, or “lady pope”—were in the process of combining their existing properties on the piazza into one great palazzo appropriate to their exalted station. The obelisk was meant to elevate the aesthetics and the stature of the entire square in advance of the Church’s Jubilee Year celebration in 1650.
“Since he had heard that I possessed skill in the Egyptian alphabet and Hieroglyphics, and that I was called to Rome for that reason,” Kircher recalled, Innocent “fetched me to himself.” Those who met the pope tended not to forget it. Innocent was ugly. (“He was tall in stature, thin, choleric, splenetic, with a red face, bald in front with thick eyebrows bent above the nose,” a Roman of the time reported. “His face was the most deformed ever born among men.”)
“Father,” Innocent said to Kircher, “we have decided to erect an obelisk, a stony mass of not small size. Yours will be the task of transforming it to life with your interpretation.”
At the time, this obelisk still “lay thrown to the ground and broken into five parts” outside town at the Circus of Maxentius, where it had been erected about twelve hundred years before. It was going to have to be made whole again. “And since from the corrosion of its letters the obelisk was greatly defective and several outlines of figures were lacking,” Kircher explained, “His Holiness wished that it be restored to its unimpaired condition by putting upon me the task of filling in all the missing portions in accordance with my knowledge.”
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 11