January 15, 2011

The Guts of Mathematics, Archimedes' Dog, and the Greaseless Anatomy of Machines

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1326

“...with his blood he confused the lines of his art”--On the death of Archimedes, in Valerius Maximus

"....Bark, bark bark!"--Archimedes' dog

I came across this unusual and not-web-reproduced image of an infamous scene in the history of mathematics, the murder of Archimedes.(The original is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.) There have been a number of depictions of the event, a few dozen artists it seems--including Daumier and Delacroix and others whose name do not begin with "d"--who have chosen to try and capture the moment. (The website at NYU reproduces some of them; Drexel also has a very good space devoted to Archimedes and is a great source for quotes dealing with the event.) This one comes from (I think) Histoire Universelle published by the ubiquitous Peter van der Aa in Amsterdam at the turn of the 18th century, and falls in line with many of its comrades in that it depicts the tragedy in the second before it occurred. One thing it has that other scenes do not--a barking dog. Maybe it belonged to Archimedes, maybe not. But there was a dog depicted here, and it was barking at the scene, probably barking at the man about to stab the mathematician, which means it would've been the mathematician's dog. But Archimedes certainly didn't hear the dog if he couldn't be interrupted by the battle outside his door or the Roman who yelled at him to turn. (I believe Roger Clemens when he says that he didn't realize he was throwing that bat fragment at someone, saying he was in the zone. It happens.)

And a detail of the dog: shows him barking from a reclined position. Jarred awake by the intruder, he sees the action just before the critical motion--not quite awake, no time to stand, the dog (snarling with teeth barred) tries its best. (I am romanticizng the dog part of course. My own dog, Bluey, now 14 or so, simply stared at the people who walked into my house last night with their luggage, thinking that mine was the bed and breakfast where they had their reservations. He sat and stared, and they stared at him. Missing their destination by one house, how disappointed they must've been to think that their retreat was filled with an old dog, kid toys, a dead Christmas tree, and the rest of the jumble.)

I'm not aware of any artist who steals the moment quite so graphically at Jost Ammon (below) does, though. He also makes no effort to remove the millenium-old event from his own Renaissance environment.

Seldom do we see a maxim so vividly depicted as with these lines from Valerius Maximus: Archimedes trying to hold a thought in his head while a Roman soldier comes tugging at him, Archimedes pushing the soldier away to protect the geometrical work that he was scribbling in the sand, and then having his head full of thoughts spilled onto the drawing he was trying to protect. What we see in the detail is almost exactly (or on the verge of being exactly) from the Valerius quote fragment “...with his blood he confused the lines of his art”: Archimedes has spoiled his geometry in the moment before his cleaved head releases the control of his muscles. It is a nasty image, the pissed-off Roman soldier—who theoretically was just looking for spoils in the looted city of Syracuse—having had enough of the three-second hesitation by the old man and reacts badly, beheading him the hard way. (I've written about this pirnt earlier in this blog, here.)

This is definitely the great CSI moment in the history of mathematics, so far as Mr. Ammon is concerned. There is no chance not to see that there is no heraldry to the moment, no faint-away moment, just blood in the sand.

And for some reason--except for the dog part--all I can really think about here is the anatomy of the machines that were shown by the great Precisionists of early 20th century art, the artists who depicted the modern industrial landscape and its tools with fantastic precision and modern-Gothic-y grace.

The artists who found modernity--a modernity found mostly in America--in massive factories, and shining metal, and spokes and gears and all of the other components of factories. There was of course the Marinetti manifesto preceding all of this, and the 1913 69th St Armory Show, and the coming of the French (Duchamp and Picabia & Co.) in 1915 and the Tzara/Huelsenbeck/Ball Dadaist 1916 movements and the rest....but what I'm reaching for is the slightly later work, the early 'twenties, with Hartley and Stella and Sheeler And Demuth and Schamberg (and even the early O'Keefe). This is where I think we see machine art, an oddly realistic semi-cubist something, depicting the power and form and grace of the machine itself rather than the expression of its dynamism.

But what happens (for me, anyway) is this--that when the guts of the machines are revealed, that when we see inside to the components, the very anatomy of modernity, we see a clean, rustless, oil-less, greaseless, world. Big and heavy, massive things of terrific density, and they smell like nothing except their own immobility, which so far as I know smells like nothing. As much as I find these artworks beautiful, I miss that their core wasn't represented--I'd would've liked a little more mess. This is antithetical I'm sure to the message, but it is the essence of the machine.

[Charles Sheeler, Stacks in Celebration, 1954.] And humans didn't often make it into these images--as much as I like the artwork of Louis Lozowick, I like it more when he peoples-up his ultra-tech/urban images. That's another story.

Comments

That's very funny, John. What fun to have been in the stream of consciousness of those mistaken visitors for those few moments.

Speaking of smells, it has always fascinated me that steel and concrete have such distinct odors. What could be sufficiently volatile to reach our noses? Yet, something does. I've tried to imagine the world as perceived by a dog, so fabulously olfactory, but of course I hardly can. A busy deli might give me a bit of the experience.

Too bad about Archimedes. I wonder if murdering marauders are God's way of keeping us from evolving too quickly?

I think it would be very confusing to wake up one morning with dog sniffing power, maybe as weird as suddenly having okra-vision. I dunno.
A friend of mine is an astronaut who made two long EVAs from the shuttle. HE says he was greeted both times on re-entry into the shuttle by a Russian cosmonaut who oared the air in front of him with his hands, savoring scent of the just-opened chamber, exclaiming that space "smelled like steak". My friend said that he didn't quite smell it, but the very first thing he and his wife did upon return and leaving the compound was to drive quickly to a steakhouse....