Ride of a lifetime
This extraordinary bit of fancy — on the Sotheby’s block in Paris on May 21 — came from the sprawling Simone Collinet collection of books, manuscripts and photos. Nine notebooks that Andre Breton had scrawled and doodled all over were among the items up for auction, but this one from 1578 is what caught my eye.
It’s an illustration from a text entitled “Theatrum Instrumentorum et Machinarum” by the French scientist Jacques Besson. That’s “Theatre of Instruments and Machines”, but the entire book is in Latin. The auctioneers were expecting to pocket between 4,000 and 6,000 euros for it.
Brimming with notions, Besson was hired by Charles IX as “master of the King’s Engines”, and in that capacity he put this book together, with illustrations by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau. Wikipedia says it was probably a rush job — only brief captions are given — due to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants, which soon sent Besson scurrying to England.
Sotheby’s sales pitch alluded to a mix of “extremely serious scientific inventions and of unusable imaginations”. Uselessness notwithstanding, the book “played a big role in the diffusion of certain ideas” by way of nine editions in five different languages over the course of 30 years.
A quick google found the whole book online thanks to the Smithsonian Institute Libraries, and the label on the above illustration is “Suspended horse-drawn carriage”. Demons seem to be the chief components in the suspension, so I’m afraid the science eludes me. See the rest.
