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The photographic news
- Bandzählung
- 35.1891
- Erscheinungsdatum
- 1891
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- Englisch
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- Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
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- Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
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- Bandzählung
- No. 1725, September 25, 1891
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The photographic news
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September 25, 1891.] THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. 673 PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHAEOLOGY. BY JAMES MEW. Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Flavius Josephus gave the name of archaeology, the former to his book relating to the origin and commencement of Rome, the latter to his history of the nation of the Jews. The archaeology which is the subject of the present article was born in the period of the Renaissance, and cradled in the Middle Ages. It has been somewhat invidiously described by Balzac as the passion—or, to speak with greater accuracy, the mania—which misleads old gentlemen into the belief that they are yet alive. This is scarcely an exact defini tion ; it is rather of the sort which proceeds from the mouths of those who sit in the seats of the scorners. Seriously described, it is the science which, treating of antiquity, investigates it by the study of such aids to its interpretation as monuments and manuscripts. The re production of these by means of photography is one of the most important of the many useful applications of this excellent art. In the matter of monuments, the ingenious photographic artist has, in the words of Gray’s “Bard,” “ample room and verge enough.” At his own sweet will he may disport himself among those huge megalithic structures to be found alike in Europe, Asia, and America, called in the Celtic “ dolmens,” and in the Welsh “cromlechs.” He may amuse himself in Devonshire and Cornwall by taking these supposed sepulchral monuments in every variety of posture and condition; or he may transfer to his sensitive plate those mysterious bones, rude implements of warfare, cooking, or ornament—it is, alas! too often uncertain which—found sometimes in the cinerary urns which these so-called table-stones enclose. Butin “tak ing” photographically the treasures revealed by them there must be no hesitation and no delay. Exposed after ages of interment to a new and sudden life of sunshine and of air, they crumble rapidly away, and, if not taken in time, are lost to the procrastinating photographer for eternity. It is true that much matter of antiquarian interest in England, as in India and Egypt and Palestine and Greece and Rome, has been already ably pictured by photographers now dead and gone, but the artist of the present may still feed on the crumbs which have fallen from their sumptuous table. He may still spend a happy day—not, indeed, of that order of felicity to be found in Rosherville, but of a staid and subdued character—in the vaults of the British Museum; or, if his fiscal resources allow it, he may take copies of Pugins’ church at Ramsgate ; or he may go still further afield, and find a very picture-book of antiquity in the ancient pine forests and solemn streets of sad Ravenna, that fossilised city in which Byron wrote his “ Faliero," and the author of the Divine Comedy sleeps his everlasting sleep. The camera is equally useful in preserving records of monuments, of architecture or of sculpture, of painting or of engraving, ordinary or extraordinary, civil or mili tary, social or domestic, sacred or profane. The photo grapher who has occupied his leisure hours with the study of architecture may take portraits of walls, houses, temples, obelisks, pyramids, theatres, tombs, and pub lic highways to his heart’s content. He who is fond of sculpture has only to set his camera before statue, bust, or bas-relief, to obtain iconographic photographs. He who is interested in paintings—and what artistic pho tographer is not?—has no lack of frescoes, and pictures on papyrus, or canvas, or wood, and of mosaics, those geometric drawings on stone. He who busies himself with engravings may carry away with him his photo graphic glyptographs; while numismatic photographs will be his who delights in medals, of every time and country, with inscriptions in every tongue, on every kind of material. The world of literature and art is all before him where to choose. He may busy himself with the reproduction of old writings, or picture a sword or a helmet, a lamp or a goblet, a bracelet or a ring, the furni ture of the men and women who lived, and moved, and had their being in the long dead past, in the ancient world of Assyria and Egypt, of Greece and Rome. As a literary archologist, he may learn not only to know for himself, but also to describe to others the works of human interest in all the periods of the past, and to perpetuate by his photographic skill the memory of those monuments which the remorseless hand of time is ever ready to convert into mouldering ruin. To the student, the work of the paleographic photo grapher is of the greatest value. The pictures of inscrip tions furnished by the camera are convenient to the scholar for the prolonged study which is generally required for their decipherment. No sketch made by any human artist will be able to equal the absolute exactitude of the photographic lens, which, moreover, produces a complete likeness in less time than the artist would require for the merest sketch. In the photographic portrait of manu script, there is happily no possibility of those copyists’ mistakes, those unlucky and misleading errata, which occur—a punishment, it may be, for sins committed in some former state of existence—to the most careful scribe. The serious results which can be caused by the mistake of a single letter are all too well-known. They are of equal importance with those which have notoriously happened in kindred branches of archologic study. Had the assistance of photography been invoked, the dark Isis with Horus in her lap would not, it may be, have seriously compromised the Christian cult by being venerated as a semblance of the black Virgin and her child, nor, perhaps, would the devout have seen St. John the Baptist borne upwards to the skies in a picture of the apotheosis of the Roman emperor Germanicus. But the work of the camera is not only convenient, exact, and rapid ; it is also comparatively easy, permanent, and cheap. The cost is often inconsiderable as the toil, and difficulties which are sufficient to appal the deftest draughtsman, or the most accomplished engraver, are changed into child’s play by the touch of the spear of the solar Ithuriel. Partially effaced texts, which may well fill the bravest paleographist with despair, are, by the camera’s co-operation, rendered decipherable. The traces of ink drawn by the ancient writer’s patient fingers— fingers resolved ages ago into their component dust—have become yellow, and of one colour with the once fair parchment upon which they are inscribed. The similarity of hue in ink and parchment makes many of the letters inscrutable to any human eye, and much of the meaning sibylline in insignificance. Not Argus, nor Lynceus, with all their far-famed visual energy, could have dis covered what the objective displays with the utmost ease, the objective to which artistic license is happily unknown. The aid of chemistry might, indeed, be invoked in the matter of the faded ink, but the means of assistance she offers are as much dreaded by the proprietors of these time-worn relics, and for the
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