For Leonardo light was never an abstract ray moving in the mind and eye of man, but a sea of rays constantly interacting with matter. And matter, objects, men, towns, were not representable through the continuous precise lines of their contours but could only be evoked by the constant fading of surfaces.
Meanwhile official science saw Vesalius publish his illustrations, in which anatomy had become an experience-based science founded on the dissection of corpses. Except the eye, however, which continued to be drawn according to traditional Graeco-Arab schemes. Leonardo’s ingenious hypotheses stayed buried in his private jottings.
In the Italian painters of the Renaissance ‘light is so omnipresent as to seem absent, and it does not appear to come from any point in the universe’: it is a sea in which the figures are immersed. In the North, on the other hand, the idea of light is completely different:
The Flemish and Dutch learned to love those things where light is caught, imprisoned in a network of reflections, and from which it emerges transformed into rainbows. Enamel, crystal, steel, coral, quartz. Out of this comes a science that pursues and surprises light at the critical points of its journey through matter and in the closed secret of the human eye.
This was true, though with many differences from painter to painter:
Van Eyck paints things as he knows they must be, and Vermeer as he perceives them. In Vermeer light is a subjective, private thing . . . In the miraculous hands of Van Eyck it is the absolute revelation of a spiritual world that is destined for the eye of the soul and emitted by the eye of God.
Starting from antiquity and the Middle Ages, the metaphors which acted as models for the functioning of the eye changed many times: the stick, the arrow, the lens, the pyramid, then (in Leonardo’s time) the camera obscura, then ‘the mirror of the world’, and the ‘window of the soul’. When in 1619 Scheiner cut the white of the eye, looked ‘inside’ the eye, and saw ‘as it were from a window’ the image in the retina ‘reflected as in a mirror’, these two metaphors became decisive. Painters began to paint a little window reflected in the pupil of faces in portraits; Dürer’s hare too, hidden in the grass, has a window in its attentive pupil.
As for the mirror, Claude Lorrain painted with his back to the landscape, which he saw reflected in a little convex mirror, conjuring up effects of distant, hazy beauty. The pathos of distance thus comes into being, a fundamental component of our culture.
The image reaches the retina reversed. How is it righted again? Leonardo had hypothesized a supplementary lens in the eye’s camera obscura, according to a system that was impeccable in optical terms, but devoid of any foundation in anatomy. It was Kepler who overcame the obstacle when he realized that turning the image the right way was an intellectual, not a physiological, operation. The time was ripe for the thinking and non-material ego of Descartes to enter the fray. But Descartes still needed anatomical backing for this, and he would choose the pineal gland, which was buried at the bottom of the brain, a well-defended fortress (the image is Pierantoni’s) that guaranteed the unity of vision and subject.
By the way, though, why on earth do we need two eyes if vision is something singular (and the world is one)? The discovery of the chiasm (the meeting point of the two optic nerves) and, gradually, of its role and how it works brought philosophy into the picture.
One question runs through the entire story we have charted: where is vision formed? In the eye or in the brain? And if it is in the brain, in which area? When one asks oneself these questions, it is natural to imagine that man carries a homunculus inside his head, who scrutinizes the image as it arrives, placing himself first behind the lens, then contemplating the retina, and then installing himself in the brain. One has to make an effort to imagine how man functions without resorting to anthropomorphism.
The question is at what precise moment of the process does light become image? Berkeley says:
Farther, what greatly contributes to make us mistake in this matter is that when we think of the pictures in the fund of the eye, we imagine ourselves looking on the fund of another’s eye, or another looking on the fund of our own eye, and beholding the pictures painted thereon. (An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision)
This alternation between eye and brain continued until the microscope proved that the retina and the visual cortex are made in the same way: this was what led the way to the realization that the retina is a peripheral portion of the cerebral cortex. In short, the brain begins in the eye. (That last sentence was said by me and let’s hope it’s right.)
The climax of Pierantoni’s book is the chapter on Camillo Golgi’s discovery: I will not summarize it because that would spoil its truly remarkable effects—both artistic and dramatic.
We thus arrive at the retina as we know it today (the description is very clear but it would not have been too much to have added a drawing allowing us to see in graphic terms all the ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ relationships). And the overall picture of sight which emerges from this process is such as to overturn the whole succession of previous models.
In every model Pierantoni sees ‘mythical’ constants, and the central thread of his book is precisely the exploding of these ‘myths’ on which our knowledge feeds, for they prevent us from understanding the reality of the natural processes even when we already possess all the necessary data. According to Pierantoni, the last of these mythical models is the computer.
This ‘mythological’ approach to the history of science and culture seems to me to be both correct and necessary: my only reservation concerns the ‘polemical approach to myths’ which lurks there. Knowledge always proceeds via models, analogies, symbolic images, which help us to understand up to a certain point; then they are discarded, so we turn to other models, other images, other myths. There is always a moment when a myth that truly functions deploys its full cognitive force.
The extraordinary thing is how centuries later a conception that has been rejected as mythical can reappear as fertile at a different stage of knowledge, taking on a new meaning in a new context. Would it not be right to conclude that the human mind—in science as in poetry, in philosophy as in politics and law—only functions on the basis of myths, and our only choice lies in adopting one mythical code over another? A knowledge that is outside any code does not exist: we just have to be careful to identify myths that are wearing out and becoming obstacles to knowledge, or worse still dangers to human co-existence.
Using the image of the biophysical structure of the retina in a ‘mythical’ way, the human mind seems to me like a tissue of ‘myth-receptors’ transmitting to each other their inhibitions and excitements, just like the photo-receptors which condition our sight and ensure that when we look at the stars we see them as made up of rays, whereas ‘in reality’ they should appear to us as dots . . .
[1982]
III
ACCOUNTS OF THE FANTASTIC
The Adventures of Three Clockmakers and Three Automata
Often the commitment that men invest in activities that seem totally gratuitous, with no other aim in mind except enjoyment or the satisfaction of solving a difficult problem, turns out to be essential in an area that nobody had foreseen and has far-reaching consequences. This is true for poetry and art, just as it is for science and technology. Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.
The construction of automata in the eighteenth century was a precursor of the industrial revolution, which would reap the benefits of mechanical solutions that had been originally devised for complicated toys. Of course it has to be said that the construction of automata was not just a game, even though it looked like it: it was an o
bsession, a demiurgic dream, a philosophical challenge to put man and machine on the same level. The critical fortune of the automaton as a literary theme, from Pushkin to Poe to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, confirms the sway of this fascination, which had both hyper-rational and unconscious elements.
All these thoughts were aroused by an unusual illustrated book published by F. M. Ricci on the ‘Androids’ of Neuchâtel: Androidi. Le meraviglie meccaniche dei celebri Jaquet-Droz (Androids: The Mechanical Marvels of the Famous Jaquet-Droz Family). In the eighteenth century Neuchâtel was the capital of clock-making not only in terms of artistry but also in scientific terms (see the six volumes of Essais sur l’horlogerie by Ferdinand Berthoud). Recently the museum of Neuchâtel has after meticulous mechanical restoration work brought back to new life three famous automata: the ‘writer’ or ‘scribe’, the ‘draughtsman’ and the ‘female musician’, constructed over 200 years ago by maestros of that tradition, the Jaquet-Droz father and son and J.-F. Leschot.
The colour plates in the volume published by Ricci document in great detail the external aspect and the internal mechanisms of the three ‘Androids’; the black-and-white plates record the graphic output of the first two, and the musical scores played on the harpsichord, while the book’s text tells the story of the artists and their creatures, their technical details and the recent restoration work. (Moreover, they have included in the box that contains the volumes a disk with the repertoire played by the ‘musician’ before and after the restoration work.)
Why on earth does such a technical and factual book provoke such a feeling of disquiet? It is true that these three ‘Androids’ do nothing to attenuate their doll-like appearance or to hide their machine-like nature. Perhaps one needs to go back to Baudelaire’s passages on toys or Kleist’s on marionettes to understand the reason for this enduring fascination. In these models the elegant and gallant eighteenth century with lace sleeves and collars and the cold, analytical eighteenth century of the diagrams in the Encyclopédie are both present and emphasized in an extreme form. In addition, the name ‘Android’ blends these hints and evokes science-fiction avant la lettre, as though they were a living species halfway between man and machine, or a race of possible invaders, in whom we would end up recognizing our doubles.
The ‘scribe’ or ‘writer’ is the one with the least intelligent face but the most complicated mechanism: his wrist moves in three directions, the quill pen traces the letters with calligraphic lines and loops, dips into the ink-well and goes to the next line like a typewriter; a device stops it when it writes a full-stop. A series of cams allows it to write the letters of the alphabet, small and capital, and to compose the sentences written into the program.
The performances carried out by the ‘draughtsman’ are on the surface more showy, but his mechanism is much less complicated than that of the ‘writer’. His repertoire consists of four drawings, closely tied to the age in which he was made: one of them is a little dog, and another is a profile of Louis XV. The story has it that on the occasion of a ‘performance’ in the presence of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette the nervous operator announced that a drawing of the late king would appear, but he did the wrong thing when starting the mechanism: the automaton’s pencil slowly drew the little dog, ‘the which matter spread a certain disquiet’.
While the two graphic geniuses have the faces of big infantile dolls, the woman-doll playing the harpsichord has such a mysterious expression and look that one can imagine perverse stories of people falling in love with her, as in works by Tommaso Landolfi or Felisberto Hernández. The author of the commentary in the book explains that she is ‘the only doll in the world who breathes, thus sharing our life, apparently drawing the source of her existence from the same air that we depend on’, and wonders whether she was not meant to be ‘offering herself through her delicate music to a lover fantasizing about unreal delights, or reviving in Pierre Jaquet-Droz the immortal memory of his young bride whom he had lost for ever . . .’
The story of Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1722–90) makes a fine, typically eighteenth-century biography. In order to dedicate himself to clock-making he abandoned his theological studies. He perfected his art with frequent stays in Paris (where already in the previous generation some maestros from Neuchâtel had established themselves as Court clock-makers), and found a base at the University of Basle working with Johann Bernoulli and other members of that famous family of mathematicians.
Jaquet-Droz’s fame soon spread from the Jura mountains to the rest of Europe. Neuchâtel in those days, although part of the Swiss Federation, was a princedom subject to the King of Prussia, and its closest links were relations with foreign Courts. With a cart full of his pendules Jaquet-Droz went all the way to Madrid, and obtained official recognition of his craftsmanship from the Court of Spain.
Back in his native land, he set up a laboratory at La-Chaux-de-Fonds with his son Henri-Louis (1752–91) and his adoptive son Jean-Frédéric Leschot (1746–1824). He was by now the head of an established firm, and it was at this point, at the height of his fortune, that he decided to build the ‘Androids’. Who provided the decisive impulse? Was it the Bernoulli family? Was it a local doctor whom chronicles of the time describe as part-inventor, part-naturalist, part-magician? Was it Leschot, whose portrait shows us the face of a wise gnome (whereas the portraits of the Jaquet-Droz, father and son, are rather inexpressive)?
Whoever it was, the fact is that after 1773–4, the date of the construction of the three automata, the life of the three clock-makers changed: they lived mostly for their creatures, showing them to illustrious visitors and taking them on tour throughout the various European capitals. But at the same time their business expanded: they founded a branch in London to export precious clocks, carillons, singing birds and other mechanical wonders to China and India.
However, some confusion started to arise: when people said ‘the Droz’ were they talking about the three clock-makers or the three automata? ‘The three Droz’ by now meant the latter: that is the way we see them in a print of the period; the three mechanical dolls took the names and surnames of members of the family. I do not know the precise date of the print: was it before or after the fall of the Bastille? One might almost say that the automata rebelled and claimed their independence by usurping the identity of their inventors.
Was this the reason that the great Jaquet-Droz firm ran into a slump and rapidly went bankrupt? Certainly the French Revolution hit the luxury goods market hard and the Napoleonic wars ruined exports; but the crisis had apparently happened earlier, a crisis which affected the whole Swiss watch-making industry.
It is also a fact that in 1789 the ‘Androids’ no longer appear in the firm’s inventory. They went from hand to hand, constantly being exhibited to the public as a spectacle and attraction. (Or was it the automata themselves that, after proclaiming the ‘rights of the automaton’, then moved freely throughout Europe?) In their tours they ended up in Saragossa, which was being besieged by Napoleonic troops, and they were then captured and carried off to France with other war booty. They then resumed their wanderings in international exhibitions, which continued throughout the nineteenth century.
The story contains a unique display of loyalty: throughout the whole of the nineteenth century the citizens of Neuchâtel never forgot about the existence of their three children who had become lost somewhere in the world. Every so often local papers would run appeals to track them down and recover them. This duly happened in 1905 thanks to a public subscription. (Or was it the automata themselves who wanted to return to their native land? They had started their wanderings in the footprints of the great adventurers of their century, indefatigable optimists
like Cagliostro, Casanova, Candide. But at the dawn of the new century they realized in time that the world was about to become impossible for those whose movements were controlled by vital mechanisms that were so simple and transparent. It was just as well they remembered that they were Swiss citizens before it was too late.) The following sentence was inserted into the programme of ‘the writer’, and he still copies it out in his eighteenth-century handwriting: ‘We shall never leave our country again.’
[1980]
Fairy Geography
Their first attribute is lightness. They are small in stature, with bodies ‘somewhat of the Nature of a condensed Cloud’ or ‘of congealled Air’, in short, of matter so thin and slender that for nourishment all they need is any liquid that can penetrate their pores as it would into a sponge, or bits of grain that they fight over with crows and mice. They live beneath the earth, in little mounds perforated by tunnels and fissures, but sometimes they are borne aloft, flying in mid-air. Their appearance and perhaps their very presence is discontinuous: only those gifted with second sight can see them, and always for brief moments as they appear and disappear. Their underground domains are illuminated by perpetual lamps which shine without any combustible matter; some say their very persons emit a greenish light. They have lives that last much longer than human lives, but they too are mortal: at a certain point, without any illness or suffering, they become rarefied and disappear . . .
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