On May 21, 2013, Saadya <[email protected]> wrote: > José Tomas Buitrago mentions a 1526 engraving by Durer, where the 2 folded > letters on Erasmus' desk appear to be of the same construction as in your > painting--that is, divided into three parts but not equally. (Presumably this > information originates from Joan Sallas who visited Cali, Colombia a few > years ago.)
That was pretty hasty & stupid of me—the last part of it anyway; it turns out Jose Tomas found this and other early paperfolds through his own independent internet research. Apologies, JTB. The engraving in question is this one: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/D%C3%BCrer_-_Erasmus_von_Rotterdam.jpg It’s an important catch: Erasmus was THE “Man of Letters” of his time, and 3 years later would even publish a manual on letter writing, "Opus de conscribendis Epistolis", that would prove immensely popular in Europe. So to represent the man at work Durer pretty much HAD to show some letters on his desk; and these are what, to an ordinary viewer, letters looked like. One notices that they are of a very similar construction to the ones shown in the 1579 painting that Karen Reeds discovered and launched this thread with: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/domenico-giuliani-and-his-servant-205778 . I think that in both cases, the letters in their partially open, non-flat form are supposed to be interpreted as having already been read: so that the man sitting at the desk is shown to be “in correspondence”—caught in the act of doing whatever it is that makes him a great humanist, intellectual etc. If so, the current title for the Italian painting that’s now at the Princeton University Art Museum might be slightly off: the seated figure is no doubt Dominico Giuliani, but contemporary viewers would more likely have seen the servant as belonging to his correspondent. Dominico is dashing off a quick letter of reply while the servant waits. Letter writing was how the threads of the network of humanist culture, social-religious reform, and science-technology were pulled together in the Renaissance, forming the basis of much of the structure of modernity that we occupy today. (A nice overview of this period in letters is given by Gábor Almási in http://www.ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/european-networks/intellectual-and-academic-networks/gabor-almasi-humanistic-letter-writing ). It is interesting to think of this activity, which is often light-hearted, a diversion, private but sometimes done with an eye to the wider public, which builds contacts between strangers, and eventually forms a network of intellectuals and an entire cultural environment—how that presages or is being reprised now by our own little practice of origami, and the network we are building for ourselves. On May 21, 2013 Chris Lott <[email protected]> wrote: >> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16726942/DomenicoGiuliani-Reconstruction.jpg > > Thanks for this. I look forward to posting a letter using this fold. I > feel like I've seen this very fold diagrammed somewhere before, but I > can't recall or find it... I sure hope you have seen this fold before Chris, because that might mean the conjecture has some basis in historical fact. My reconstruction was based only on the visuals of Karen’s painting and on what makes sense, if one wants to hide away the written side of a sheet with minimal folds and also fold it so as to keep the shape stably closed. Taking this logic further, if one’s letter consisted of multiple sheets, instead of a single fold at the left and top margins there would probably have been 2 folds, to ‘roll’ the sheets together, before insertion into the pocket. And if we were doing this in the modern fashion, instead of Step 7, the lower edge of the sheet would be stuffed into the pocket past the line of the upper margin, and then folded across it, the whole ‘cylinder’ then being flattened at the same time; this would lock the bottom into the top. It would also create a “lower margin” fold, which you would see upon opening the letter. ---Was this done too in the 16th century? Just how modern were they? The reason this matters, is that simply folding up a letter in some standard way, that does not keep itself stably closed and is meant to be held in place by an envelope or string—that would not qualify, for me, as origami. But turning a sheet that you’ve written on into its own envelope, making a pocket out of one flap and inserting another into it to close or even to lock it—that is very much origami in the modern sense. You are turning a flat sheet INTO something. The cleverness of it would have been appreciated, then as now. And it might well have triggered the question in some of these sharp minds of the humanist/scientist network: What ELSE can you make, just by folding up a sheet of paper? So it is a possible inflection-point for the beginnings of origami. All this is of course speculation. But why leave it there? Surely if this was a standard letter-folding/envelope-making practice in Europe (at least for the decades we’ve bracketed, 1526-1579), diagrams of some sort should exist in some etiquette manual from the period. And if not in a manual, then certainly the letters themselves, even in their open form, will show the crease pattern on them, and any writings, addresses, seals etc on the outer side would also give clues to the manner of folding. I don’t know about this Dominico Giuliani, but Erasmus as said was possibly the most prolific correspondent of his day. Surely some of his actual, physical letters exist in libraries and private archives across Europe? How about it, you historians of culture/science out there: can we have an answer to this simple origami question? Saadya ------------- Saadya Sternberg, PhD Origami Artist & Curator e: [email protected] w: origami-aesthetics.blogspot.com
