Somewhere in Paris, in the 1860s, a sculptor bends over a table. On it, in clay, a ballroom is taking shape: skeletons and demons dancing, a skeleton orchestra at the back. When the last figure is in place, a camera…
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Picture a card-maker in a French provincial town, some time in the eighteenth century. He has paper, brushes and paint in his workshop, but he cannot simply print a deck of cards. The woodblocks that carry the faces of…
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In 1552, in Rome, a set of forty-seven copper plates was engraved. They mapped the human body with a care no one had matched: the kidneys, the great vessels, the small bones of the ear, the nerves branching like river…
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A sheet of paper lies on the table, coloured red, yellow, turquoise and black, and it makes no sense: two figures stretched along an arc into a smear, bent around a blank circle. Stand a polished metal cylinder on that…
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Picture an engraver who has just finished a perspective scene, a complete little world incised on copper. He prints it, colors it by hand, and then takes a blade to it. He cuts the sky away from behind the figures on…
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In 1530, a title page made a proud announcement to Italian readers: here was the Bible in their own language, translated from the original Hebrew and Greek. It was the claim of a new age, confident, philological, almost…
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Picture Milan in 1814. Napoleon has fallen, the Austrians are back, and the returning administration is winding up the leftovers of the French regime, including a state-owned playing card factory that had never quite…
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Hold a small black cone to your eye and look. A cathedral opens in front of you, seen in daylight: pale stone, a quiet nave, the ordinary colours of an afternoon. Now a hidden shutter closes over the front of the…
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