Covers Unbound

  Visual puns, like verbal puns, can be crass, foolish, trivialising; but they can also be expressive. In language, puns can be groan-provoking jokes, daftness, but they can also be Joyce's Finnegans Wake : expressing by creative superposition a complex rather than a simple signification. In the visual arts, the visual pun emerged as an element in European Mannerist art of the later 16th- and early 17th-century, Mannerism being a reaction against the High Renaissance aesthetic of harmony, proportion, balance and idealised beauty. Mannerist figures were creatively distorted, elongated, perspective was foreshortened, compositions were often crowded with serpentinely interacting figures, compositions in which arms could be legs, or vice versa. In twentieth-century Surrealism, itself a descendent of Mannerism, these visual ambiguities and juxtapositions are emphasised to bring out a dream logic, sometimes, as with the work of Max Ernst or Salvador Dalí, in complex compositions whose v...

The triptych is an artform with a long history. The word derives from the Greek—not a triple  tych ,whatever that might be, but tri , three, ptychs (πτυχή, “a fold”): a painting to be folded in on itself. A typical triptych is painted on boards that constitute three linked compartments, the central one usually being bigger than the two lateral ones, hinged so the outer flaps can fold-over the centre, concealing, or protecting, the whole. In some triptychs all three elements are the same size. There are a great many medieval and Renaissance examples of triptych art, many of them altarpieces representing sacred or Biblical subject, made to be positioned over the altar in a church. In fact the triptych first emerged in Italy in the fourteenth-century, swiftly replacing the earlier preference for polyptych panels—that is, paintings with multiple panels, in pentagonal or gabled dossal patterns. It is not clear why the more limited triptych rose to such prominence at this period. Art hi...

  A pendant to yesterday's post: here is the cover to the first French edition ( Les Premiers Hommes dans la Lune , 1901) of H G Wells's First Men in the Moon : a ‘cartonnage doré et coloré’, with a Selenite alien looking out at us. Illustrations for this edition were by Martin van Maële, a French illustrator who worked for the Parisian publisher Felix Juven (van Maële also illustrated Juven's French translations of the Sherlock Holmes stories) but was best known, then as now, for a wide range of pornographic images of sexual congress, involving many naked, pneumatic women, old men, clergymen and sometimes children (I do not recommend you googling his oeuvre from a work computer). The title page of Juven's edition attributes the work to ‘H-G Wells’, perhaps in the belief that English Herbert George was actually Henri-Georges, in the French style. But the cover is richer, with its gilded illustration and crimson binding, than the more understated English first edition c...