{"id":12664,"date":"2012-11-29T01:32:38","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T01:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=12664"},"modified":"2012-11-29T01:32:38","modified_gmt":"2012-11-29T01:32:38","slug":"athanasius-kirchers-pyramids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2012\/11\/29\/athanasius-kirchers-pyramids\/","title":{"rendered":"Athanasius Kircher’s pyramids"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"kircher.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Athanasius Kircher\u2019s pyramids aren’t as vast as Thomas Cole’s dream construction<\/a>\u2014for size you need Kircher’s Tower of Babel<\/a>\u2014but they’re still eccentric inasmuch as they don’t correspond to any group of Egyptian structures. One of the great things about the etchings in Kircher’s books is the way their detail gives a sense of veracity to their depictions. Go slightly further back in time and you’ll find scenes that are just as eccentric but much more crudely rendered; go forward a few years and too much was known about ancient ruins to ever depict them this way again. The illustration is the frontispiece to Kircher’s Sphinx Mystagoga<\/em> (1676) which can be seen in full at the University of Heidelberg<\/a>. The details in Kircher’s illustrations benefit from the high-resolution scans<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Steve in the comments to yesterday’s post mentions another painting featuring an impossible view of architecture through the ages (pyramids included), The Professor’s Dream<\/em> (1848) by Charles Robert Cockerell. BLDGBLOG ran a post about Cockrell’s paintings<\/a> a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The etching and engraving art archive<\/a><\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Athanasius Kircher\u2019s Tower of Babel<\/a>
\n\u2022 China Monumentis by Athanasius Kircher<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Athanasius Kircher\u2019s pyramids aren’t as vast as Thomas Cole’s dream construction\u2014for size you need Kircher’s Tower of Babel\u2014but they’re still eccentric inasmuch as they don’t correspond to any group of Egyptian structures. One of the great things about the etchings in Kircher’s books is the way their detail gives a sense of veracity to their … Continue reading “Athanasius Kircher’s pyramids”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,2,42],"tags":[215,1841,4325],"class_list":["post-12664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-art","category-books","tag-athanasius-kircher","tag-bldgblog","tag-charles-robert-cockerell"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-3ig","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}