What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [132]
Naomi Wilzig
179 would probably be more at home in the Kinsey Institute: Geoff Nicholson, Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of “Erotica” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 26. Any quotes and paraphrasing of Nicholson’s account of his jet-lagged visit to Wilzig’s condo in Lutz, Florida, are from the chapter “Women and Museums,” 25-52.
181 wonder-cabinets that proliferated all over Europe in the sixteenth century, filled pell-mell: Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 77-99. The growth of Wunderkammern, or wonder-cabinets, across Europe in the sixteenth century was stimulated by scientific discoveries and technological advances in optics and engineering. Global expeditions were also returning with ancient texts and marvelous curiosities. In particular, as Weschler describes, there was Columbus, who returned from America with stuff “so strange and so new as to seem to sanction belief in all manner of wondrous prospects and phantasms for years thereafter.” Those disorienting collections seemed, he added, to have “no order whatsoever to the pell-mell pile, or none discernible to us, save that of continuous, compounding amazement.” According to Weschler, in the words of Adalgisa Lugli, a contemporary Italian art historian, the museum in the seventeenth century “was still conceived as a place where . . . one could move about without having to solve or face the problem of continuity.” I had a similar feeling about Naomi’s World Erotic Art Museum.
Myrna Hoffman
230 Among other things, he used mirrors to critique his paintings: Mark Pendergrast, Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2003), 131-57. Leonardo experimented with a type of anamorphosis different from the one Myrna uses. It can be seen in the notes and drawings in Codex Atlanticus, kept in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. As Pendergrast notes, there are at least two examples of elongated sketches, known as “slant art,” in which an image is hidden when a design is looked at frontally but becomes clear when the paper is turned perpendicularly. In the sixteenth century, artists from Durer to Breugel in northern Europe, and from Giorgione to Raphael in Italy, used mirrors to create art. But some, including, most famously, Parmigianino, used mirrors to distort reality. In 1524, he painted his round Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, in which the young artist looks out impassively with heavily hooded eyes while his hand, which lies close to the mirror, balloons to nearly a quarter of the canvas.
As the Italians were experimenting with slant and mirror art, the Chinese invented anamorphosis for reflecting cylinders, which they often used to create and hide erotic art. In the early 1600s, Ahmed I, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, purchased a number of Chinese anamorphoses along with other objets d’art. In 1611, a twenty-one-year-old French painter named Simon Vouet must have seen some of them when he spent a year living in Constantinople with the French ambassador. The art soon became popular among Italian and French artists—thanks, perhaps, to Vouet’s painting Eight Satyrs Admiring the Anamorphosis of an Elephant, of around 1625—and spread to Holland, Germany, England, and Scandinavia. After his return to France, Vouet became a sought-after painter of royalty and nobility, with larger-than-life portraits decorated with winged cherubs. He remained devoted, however, to his interest in anamorphism and helped mathematician Jean-Louis Vaulezard explain it to the public for the first time in Perspective Cylindrique et Conique, published in 1630. The manual illustrated how to create anamorphic