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CHAPTER 16 TECHNOLOGIES ‘MADE IN GREECE’: KONSTANTINOS SIMONIDES’ STEAMPUNK INVENTIONS THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Lilia Diamantopoulou
‘The mirror’s fascination lies in its ambiguous relation to truth.’1 This is how Nikolas Calas introduces his Mirrors of the Mind (1975). In this essay he reflects on mirrors, prisms, self-reflections, narcissism, mechanical reproductions such as photography, and illusions as a part of reality from a philosophical, psychological and artistic perspective, taking into consideration examples that range from byzantine icons to Van Eyck and Picasso. Calas had already been preoccupied with mirrors in Confound the Wise; more than thirty years earlier he wrote: ‘Just as much as fire or steam or electric light or the camera, the mirror is a machine, machine meaning nothing else, as its Greek origin indicates, than invention’.2 Taking Calas’ thoughts as a starting point, my chapter deals with the relationship of mirrors and reflections to truth and reality, as well as illusion and deception in the work of Konstantinos Simonides, who vehemently advocated the Greek origin of several crucial European technological inventions of the nineteenth century. In 1849, Konstantinos Simonides, who is now known as a great forger, publishes the Symais, which is claimed by the editor to be a work of the Byzantine monk Meletios of Chios, dated back to the thirteenth century. Its subject is the ‘History of the Apollonian School of the Island of Symi’. The book is furnished with a detailed preface, footnotes and references in scientific form, as well as a glossary. Already on the title page Simonides appears as the sole editor, publishing the manuscript for the first time ‘unchanged with addition of notes and Prolegomena’.3 The text is a mélange of real and invented sources:
historical characters like Stephanos Byzantios, Strabo, Eustatius of Thessalonica and Diodorus are mixed with imaginary authors and their treatises such as Eulyros and his ‘Eθνικά [National]’, or Laostefos and his ‘Ποικίλη Ιστορία [Varied History]’. As may have been expected, Simonides was preparing the way for future editions of these fictitious texts, which he announced in the footnotes and from which he had already published extracts in newspapers. The Symais is prefaced by a brief letter from the monk Meletios of Chios to his colleague Methodios. In the letter Meletios states that he now pursues his desire to provide informations about the most important painters of the Holy Mountain. The work ends with the wood print of the signature of Meletios, a note specifying that the work was completed in 1236. On page 61 we find an extended list of all teachers, pupils and inventors of the school of Symi, enriched with brief biographical information.4
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The invented authorial persona of Meletios did not want to confine himself to the icon-painters of Mount Athos, and therefore he resolved to go back to the description of the Apollonian School founded in 377 ad on Symi, from which the first major school of icon-painting emerged.5 This kind of listing important painters and artists and their works is strongly reminiscent of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis (book 35) and Vasari’s Vite and may well have been inspired by them. According to Meletios,
the High School of Symi was a miraculous site: it had already anticipated all the great inventions and technological achievements of modern times, since Late Antiquity and the early Greek Middle Ages. Among other things, the printing press, copper engraving (p. 16), the paper (p. 17), the fire cannon (pp. 20–23; 140–145), the telescope (p. 19) and the diving bell were invented there. Mirrors, glasses and polished silver plates play an important role as technical components of these inventions. As for Simonides, to detect and publicize these achievements constitutes a patriotic act. He writes in his comments to Symais: A new time dawns in Greece today. Thanks to Meletios from Chios. The invention of the telescope is considered a new thing, and is attributed to the German Jansen. If Germany boasted of Jansen and his puny telescope, how well must Greece [brag] to have the much wiser, much older, the great Sevastos who has not just invented the telescope, which is described as much more important than anything ever preceeding, but also oil painting, engraving, stone and wood printing, papermaking and more or less also the divine typography for which our contemporaries brag as inventors. Above all, however, is the mercury underwater boat (as it is described) that the Europeans have yet to invent, no matter how hard the wisest and most imaginative brains in Western Europe might ever try, persistently and pointlessly investing time. The Europeans boast of it, and with them, unfortunately, many of us who have become their advocates. But let the gentlemen know that compared to our immortal, glorious ancestors, whose fame we share as their true descendants, they are merely infants. And how many more superior inventions come from this school and bring forth the greatness of the Greeks, but remain buried or unknown because the written testimonies are lost.6 With the case of the telescope, Simonides consciously selects a prestigious object of first-class scientific value. The telescope is connected to the scientific revolution of the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries and is associated with names like Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe or Johannes Kepler.7 Certainly, Simonides had his ‘sources of inspiration’ and it might be presumed that he extracts his information from contemporary newspapers and reports on the current technological developments of his time in order to project them to the past as alleged technological achievements of ancient and medieval Greece. The description of the diving bell, that consisted of mirrors among other things, is a good example to illustrate this point:
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Anastasios Nikolaou dived to the bottom of the sea and rode around, wearing an asbestos suit and sitting in an iron bell and an iron ship constructed by concave mirrors and skins in the middle. Before diving, he made a coal fire in the iron bell, added mercury, moved the copper machines through fire and mercury, dived, and flames and steam shot out of the pipes.8 Actually, Simonides describes methods of immersion which are reminiscent of the technological developments of his own time. The anachronistic projection of the diving bell to a distant past is not unique, unusual or unprecedented, especially if seen against the background of literary traditions. Consider, for example, the numerous representations of Alexander the Great in the miniatures of illuminated manuscripts of Alexander’s romance, depicting the Hellenistic monarch in a diving bell.9 Finally, it is not uncommon for contemporary scientific works to seek prestigious origin for new inventions in (Greek and Roman) antiquity or in myth. This can be further illustrated by the example of the burning glass (Fig. 16.1). Wilhelm Benjamin Busch (1804: 195–206) discusses the origins of concave mirrors, beginning with Hebenstreits’ theory mentioned in De speculis (1727), according to which Prometheus, presented as a Caucasian prince, was the first to use burning glasses.10 As further sources of evidence for the knowledge of fire-making mirrors Busch recalls Plutarch and Pliny and deals with the question of the destruction of Marcellus’ Roman fleet by Archimedes with the help of such mirrors.11 The sources usually cited in the contemporary technological debate are ranging from Galen, Lucian, Anthemius of Tralles (‘Περί παραδόξων μηχανημάτων [Concerning Wondrus Machines]’, fragment printed by Dupuy in 1777), and far beyond this Zonaras (who cites the burning of Vitalianus’ fleet during the siege of Constantinople as a parallel example), to Tzetztes and Eustathios of Thessalonike; the latter refers to the writings of Diodorus of Sicily, Dio Cassius, Hero, Philo and many more,12 whose complete works, however, are lost (they survived either in fragments or in Arabic or Latin translations) and therefore their historical credibility is called into question.13 Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) was one of the most famous scientists who tested such reports through experiments.14 After him other scientists and artists tried to manufacture burning glasses and prove that wood, stone, metals and even the almost indestructible diamond could be burned or melted by bundled sunlight. In this way, more or less authentic sources triggered a scientific Renaissance and modern scholars came up with their own inventions through practical examination of ancient sources. Seen under this light Simonides appears to be a man of his time, doing nothing less than his contemporaries by adding another (albeit fictional) incident to this series of reported inventions and inventors that anticipated modern developments. More specifically he reported that the Symian inventor Evdoupos managed to scare away Arab pirates by using burning mirrors from on top of the mountains of Symi.15 Moreover, Simonides also used texts generally accepted as real sources. He refers, for example, to the above mentioned Anthemius of Tralles (ca. 474–558), best known as one of the architects of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and presents him – as it might have 191
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Fig. 16.1 Front page of the Latin edition of Alhazen’s Book of Optics (ed. Friedrich Risner, 1572) showing the use of burning mirrors, distorted images caused by refraction in water, rainbows and other optical effects.
been expected – as a student of the school of Symi.16 In a long footnote where Anthemius is praised as the inventor of steam power, he refers to his main sources Byzantida and Konstandiada, which are both fictitious works. The passage concludes with an anecdote extracted from Agathias Scholastikos Kyrinaios in the edition of Niebuhr.17 Simonides cites it with bibliographic accuracy.18 According to this (apparently real) source, Anthemius was in dispute with his neighbour Zenon, who had built his house too high. Since Anthemius did not achieve anything by legal means, he contrived other ways to annoy Zeno: he virtually engineered a minor earthquake by sending steam through leather tubes he had fixed around Zeno’s house and by simulating thunder and lightning into Zeno’s eyes from a slightly hollowed mirror. In Anthemius’ treatise ‘On Burning Glasses’, the ancient sage intended to construct a kind of surface that would reflect sunlight to a single point, thus trying to recreate the mirror construction of Archimedes, with which the ancient Greek engineer was said to have set fire to Roman ships at the Battle of Syracuse. Unluckily, Anthemius failed. Apparently inspired by this (seemingly very imaginative) passage, Simonides reports of (the fictitious) Sevastos, who 192
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experimented with burning glasses in a similar way, inventing also a two weeks lasting ‘luminous ball [φωτοβόλος σφαίρα]’ and leaving behind ten books entitled ‘Michanikon’.19 Sevastos’s end, Simonides claimed, was tragic as he was hit and burned by his own invention: a jet of fire produced by a ‘huge mirror [μέγα κάτοπτρον]’ (p. 22). The significance of the reflected image, mirrors and optics is also crucial in order to comprehend another invention, the ‘heliotypia’, a forerunner of photography. As expected, Simonides attributes this invention to the Greeks. Simonides repeats the attribution of the heliotypia to the Greek legendary Athonite monk/painter Manuel Panselinos in his forged version of the ‘Painter’s Manual’.20 In Simonides’ version of the Manual we are dealing with several forms of textual counterfeiting. It should first be noted that the basis was provided by a manuscript which is not suggested as fiction. Simonides’ source, the ‘Painter’s Manual’, is supposed to have been written between 1723 and 1733 by Dionysius of Phourna (ca. 1670–1745), an Athonite monk, based on presumed older manuals. The Manual contained instructions for the production of pigments and provided instruction and iconographic guidance for the illustration of individual figures and complex compositions. Moreover, it introduced the reader to the world of the ‘anthivola’ (preparatory drawings on paper), their production and the technologies of their use for the faithful reproduction of standard iconographic types of saints and scenes either on murals or on icons. The Manual had and still has a wide circulation among painters but became public only after a French translation was edited by Adolph Didron and Paul Durand in 1845. They discovered the book in 1839, during a journey on Mount Athos.21 Konstantinos Simonides, who visited Mount Athos at about the same time as the French travellers, made a copy of his own from the original manuscript around 1840, which he later offered to the Frenchmen.22 The main concern of the Simonideian version was to falsely date the manuscript back to the year 1458. Both, title page and incorporated text, should indicate this year.23 Simonides had intended to imitate a linguistically older style by means of corrections; however, Alexandros Rangavis (1851, 553), Papadopoulos Kerameus (1909) and Stefanos Koumanoudis unmasked it as a forgery.24 Simonides announced in the newspapers that he had in his possession a more complete and more accurate version of the ‘Painter’s Manual’, and thus presented it to a circle of Greek scholars in Athens. The Ministry of Education of the ‘Bavarocracy’ appointed a specialized examination-committee in order to investigate the authenticity of Simonides’ manuscript, which was declared an original. Nevertheless, several scholars, such as Rangavis, remained sceptical.25 Simonides’ manuscript was finally edited in 1853 and it evidently contained fake passages that are not found in any other version of the ‘Painters’ Manual’.26 The most outstanding fake passage is the one referring to Manouel Panselinos. There the legendary painter is declared not only the greater Greek painter of all but also the inventor of heliotypia, a precursor of (colour!) photography.27 The procedure is described as follows: How to raise houses, trees, animals, people, and whatever else you desire, into the sunlight.
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First set out to construct a telescope of walnut wood that can be unscrewed in the middle; then fix two rounded pieces of glass to either side. These pieces of glass are made in Constantinople by the famous Joasaph of Polycarp, whose workshop is near the church of the Three Hierarchs. Then build a stand upon which to place it. [. . .] Then take red powder, the kind that goldsmiths use for cleaning silver and gold, and sugarstone, which you must first burn in the oven and then rub until it becomes white like flour. In this powder you must add the juice from wild celery root, after having boiled it well and kneaded it, and once it dries you must rub it again. [. . .] Then [. . .] you must polish the panel [. . .] until it shines. [. . .] You must then take your instrument and point it at what you wish to bring into the light, and once you have managed to project the outlines of the objects on the back glass clearly, you must carefully place the panel in its place, and quickly uncover the piece of glass at the front, but only until you can count to ten. [. . .]. And even you will be amazed; for not only will the forms be unaltered, but the natural colours will also be the same, and I dare say, they will appear even more beautiful.28 This section did not find its way into the French edition of the Encheiridion by Didron and Durand.29 Simonides explained the omission as either an indication of the incompleteness of the manuscript used by Didron and Durand, or an indication of their malicious intentions.30 At the same time, his description is intended to challenge the invention of photography as a French invention and to present it as a Greek invention instead. At any rate, Manouel Gedeon and Konstantinos Oikonomos were the first to accept the thesis that Panselinos was the inventor of photography, although they themselves noted that Simonides’ description of the heliotypia clearly had parallels with Daguerre’s (1787–1851) Manual of Photography, while the name ‘heliotypia’ itself goes back to Joseph Nicéphore Niépces’ (1765–1833) ‘heliography’.31 In the description quoted above, chemicals that could not have existed in the sixteenth century were replaced by Simonides with natural ‘juice of wild celery’ or ‘crushed shellfish’, thus making out of Simonides an early representative of steampunk.32 The whole procedure of observing through a hole in the window the mirror-inverted projection of an image onto the opposite wall, as set out in the further course of the Simonideian painter’s manual, is much reminiscent of the techniques used by of the camera obscura (Fig. 16.2): I made this discovery as follows: one day I slept until noon, when I stayed in the monastic Skete of Saint Demetrios; suddenly I woke up from a terrible dream and I saw on the wall of my room various trees, animals, monks and similar things. First, I became ecstatic and I watched for one hour, then it went off. Then I observed that the window of my room had a hole in the size of a Konstantinato-coin, and opposite it a wall with a window, and between them was a large glass [. . .] and on that glass was drawn shadowy everything I saw, and I was amazed.33
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Most probably Simonides knew about it through his education as a painter and engraver as well as via foreign travellers who were using the camera obscura frequently.34 Furthermore, it should be noted that the first photo studios of the newly established Greek state, shortly after the invention of the new medium, beside Athens, were set up on Mount Athos.35
Simonides himself, being a person who visited several libraries worldwide and resided in the monasteries of Mount Athos and at Saint Catherine’s on Sinai – both places claiming to possess the largest reservoir of manuscripts and early printed books – he could have easily accessed
fundamental sources containing theories of optics, vision, light and colour as for example basic works like The Book of Optics (printed in 1572 by Friedrich Risner, see Fig. 16.1) by the medieval Arab scholar known as Alhazen (965– 1039/40) or the popular Magiae Naturalis (1558) by Giambattista della Porta (ca. 1535– 1615). All these treatises were accessible in various editions, and they all contained similar descriptions of burning mirrors and camerae obscurae (Fig. 16.2). The attempt to cast images of the real world by optical aids led to the development of technical innovations regarding the projection, reflection and fixation of the image on a surface, either by copying the image with the technique of traditional anthivola, with the help of a camera obscura, camera lucida or with curved mirrors, or later on by capturing it with chemical photography.36
Fig. 16.2 Ink drawing of a camera obscura from an early seventeenth century illustrated Sketchbook on military art, including geometry, fortifications, artillery, mechanics, and pyrotechnics (Rosenwald Coll. ms. no. 27, p. 249; Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division). 195
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According to my understanding, Simonides is trying meticulously to sneak in the idea of a Renaissance back in Byzantine time. For the Greeks, the return to the classical principles of image-making was not a re-discovery, but a continuation process that preserved the ancient Greeks’ achievements through Byzantium. Moreover, he underlines the significance of the Byzantine link for the transmission of knowledge to the West and the development of sciences and the arts. In cases where the sources do not attest to his theoretical schema, he allows himself to help a little. In this context Simonides goes another step further in his mystification of the painter Panselinos: he publishes
an engraving of the Evangelist Matthew’s portrait, a facsimile of a fresco painting allegedly preserved on Mount Athos and made by Hierotheus in the fifth century. The latter was a disciple of
Manouel Panselinos (Simonides 1861 and 1862, frontispiece). The painting bears no similarities to any other painting by Panselinos or his disciples and is rendered in a clearly western, naturalistic style, which comes to confirm Didron’s declaration of Panselinos to be ‘le Raphaèl ou plutót le Giotto de l’école byzantine’.37 In a commentary to the painting, which eventually develops into a concise treatise on Byzantine art in general, Simonides concludes that garments and ornaments in this painting ‘denote the affinity between Grecian and Byzantine art’.38 It is again
Rangavis who reveals the fraud: he confirms that he himself saw Simonides in the library for hours, copying an image from a large book. If we now summarize Simonides’ balancing act between fact and fiction according to what has been said above, we reach the following conclusion: his presumed philological editions are meticulously made to look like scientific editions. In an age when philology as a scientific field flourished, Simonides emulated the characteristics of widely circulating philological editions by imitating the printed image, adding footnotes and annotations, transcriptions, illustrations, engravings and facsimiles. In the footnotes, he clearly differentiates between his own words (‘editor’s notes’) and quotes (source references). In my mind, what is striking is his constant concern to advertise and confirm the originality and authenticity of the presented text. To forestall critics, Simonides denies his authorship in his editions, arguing that he never could have that much imagination. But when it comes to credibility and originality, why is the text so easily debunked as a fake? Simonides is – like almost every other counterfeiter – an incorrigible narcissist; in the end, he does not want to be remembered as the mere publisher of the discovered texts, but as their author. And if it were not for his conspicuous (in some cases unethical and criminal) intention to deceive, Simonides would have earned poetic laurels. Disillusionment leads above all to the fact that the quoted sources and names of persons, places and writers cannot be verified by other sources as they do not appear anywhere else.
According to Rangavis (1851, 595), it is also the
similarities in style in all discovered manuscripts that convict him as a forger. In addition to the personal motivations that drive each counterfeiter –
Anthony Grafton cites social or professional ambitions, fun or hatred39 – Simonides clearly has also ideological reasons. His forgeries, as has been shown, have mainly socio-political intentions: through his ‘discoveries’ he tries to shape the image of Greece outside its tight borders, and therefore he makes an earnest effort to contribute to the process of nation196
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building. At the same time, he takes advantage of the zeal of the Europeans – mostly German and French travellers and scholars – who demonstrated an increasing interest in the late antique and medieval culture of the Greek-speaking world. In Greece, the Simonides phenomenon became a national affair: the newspapers took sides either in favour or against him. In the end a committee of experts was formed to decide on the authenticity of the manuscripts, and whether the publication of his works, which would be deemed a national treasure if their authenticity was proven, should be promoted by the state or not.
The committee of experts under the ‘Bavarian Reign’, resolved that a large part of the Simonideian corpus should be genuine. Patriotic motivation still plays a fundamental role in the ongoing recognition of his work. This is evident in a hitherto unpublished
poetic reception of Simonides’ Symais by Kalodoukas N. Kyramarios (also Kyramaridis Polynikou Simaiou, 1862–1945). The poem, which relates the history of the island of Syme from the year 1885,40 lists the inventors and their inventions mentioned in Symais and praises Simonides himself as the ‘wise man who best told the story of the island of Syme’. Simonides’ nationalist-patriotic counterfeiting activities are undoubtedly an extreme and dazzling case. Despite this, it highlights and illuminates the interrelated processes of nineteenth-century nation-building and how the education of the nation is involved with fictional narratives. Early research on nationalism was in constant use of concepts such as
‘invented traditions’ (Eric Hobsbawm) or ‘imagined communities’ (Benedict Anderson). Simonides provides us with an idealistic and almost stereotypical example of the temptations of fiction for national narratives.41 If we come back to the subject of mirrors and mirroring we can summarize their usage in art (painting, photography) and science (technological inventions) by projecting on two figures: Narcissus and Prometheus. Although they seem to be very different figures, Narcissus and Prometheus have one thing in common: the mirror. Nikolas Calas, who was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, had outlined the relation between Narcissus and Prometheus in an inspirational way. We can conclude with his words: ‘The doctrine of art for art’s sake makes of art the mirror of art and of Narcissus the opposite of Prometheus. The dichotomy must be overcome. Fire is produced by holding a mirror to the sun’ (Calas 1975, 9). One could argue that Simonides himself bears characteristics of both Narcissus and Prometheus: on the one hand, he possesses narcissistic selfadmiration, on the other hand he displays creative ambitions. Simonides is not writing for himself; his works are not meant to be just belles lettres. His actions are aiming at a wider audience, pursuing highly ambitious cultural-changing goals.
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Chapter 16 1. The poet and art historian Nikolas Calas (1907–1988) is well-known as a key figure in the development of Surrealism in Greece, but what is less known is that he was also a great admirer of mirrors. The booklet Mirrors of the Mind accompanied a portfolio of prints and objects by renowned artists like Vincenzo Agnetti, Arakawa, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Meret Oppenheim, 242
Notes to pp. 189–193 Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray and James Rosenquist and was presented in a number of international exhibitions (USA, Italy, Mexico, Greece) curated and compiled by himself in the years 1975–1977. 2. Calas 1942, 200. 3. Simonides 1849, frontpage. 4. The section closes again with the wood print of the signature of Meletios (p. 174) and his testament (175–178) and is followed by the biography of Eulyros written by a certain Nikephoros Daidalou from Corfu (pp. 178–180). 5. Simonides 1849, 3 Fn. 1; 61 (source in Greek). 6. Simonides 1849, 19. 7. For further reading see Van Helden/Dupré/Van Gent 2010, Edgerton 2009 and Willach 2008. 8. Simonides 1849, 93 (source in Greek). 9. This is for example the case in a miniature in a manuscript from the thirteenth century (No. 11040, Burgundy Library Brussels) printed in Beebe 1938, Fig. 6. 10. Busch 1804, 196. 11. For a thorough examination of the Archimedean mirror legend, see Simms 1977, 1–24. 12. To the list of sources mentioned by Busch Diocles should be added; see Toomer 1976. For burning glasses in Greek antiquity in general Knorr 1983 and Acerbi, 2011. 13. The Archimedian invention is discussed in Dutens 1775. Cf. also Donndorf ‘Metallspiegel’, ‘Brennspiegel’, Donndorf, 1818, 76; both could be Simonides’ sources. 14. See Ars magna lucis et umbrae, Rome 1646, 888, Tab. XXXI. 15. Simonides 1849, 104–105. 16. See Simonides 1849, 20 footnote. For more information about Anthemius see Huxley 1959. 17. Niebuhr 1828, Book E, pp. 291–294. 18.
Simonides may have known the ‘Fragments’ of Anthemius through the edition of Westermann’s Παραδοξογράφοι [Marvel Writers] whose work may generally have been a source of inspiration for Simonides. Cf. specifically for mirrors and their typology in Anthemius, Westermann 1839, 149–158. 19. Simonides notes in a footnote to this invention: ‘What can one say about this ball of light? Physicists should comment on this’ (p. 23, fn. 1). 20. According to recent research, the painter Panselinos became legendary, so that the question has now been raised if he was ‘man or metaphor’; on that see Milliner 2016. 21. Didron 1845, XXI, XXIII–XXVI and Kakavas 2008, 10. Brockhaus 1891, 160 fn. 3 mentions two manuals he saw in
Karyes. Kakavas 2008, 267–301 lists
69 manuscripts of the ‘Painters’ Manual’, four of which he attributes to Simonides. See also Hetherington’s list on pp. 113–115. The publication contains many comments and has a long introduction. It is interesting that Didron dedicated it to the writer Victor Hugo, ‘the immortal author of the Notre Dame de Paris [L’immortel auteur de Notre-Dame de Paris]’, Didron 1845, frontpage. The manual was printed at the expense of the French government, see Unger 1870, 292. 22. See Omont 1888, 367, No. 38 and Kakavas 2008, 11. According to Omont 1888, 367, 38 and 39 and ibid. 1890, 432–433, there were two manuscripts in the
Municipal Library in Chartres that came from Paul Durand to the library.
Durand No. 827 (in Omont No. 38) is a copy made by Simonides at Athos around 1840 (Pap. 268 fol. P.); Durand 828 (in Omont No. 39) is a copy made by Durand (Pap. 409 fol. P). However,
the former was destroyed during a bombing in 1944, see Hetherington 1974, V Fn. 7 and Kakavas 2008, 270–271. The manuscript 243
Notes to pp. 193–195 contained a note written by Durand (Hetherington 1974, v. 7) stating it was
purchased from Simonides in 1847. There was a note from Simonides, that he had found it on Mount Athos on 15 March 1840 and copied it (Omont, 1888, 3, 367, no. 38). See also PapadopoulosKerameus 1909, ε’, footnote 3 and Kakavas 2008, 11 footnote 23. For further headings of the manuscripts related to Simonides see Papadopoulos-Kerameus 1909, ιγ’-ιε’, Fn. 1. 23. Papadopoulos-Kerameus 1909, ε’-η’, ιδ’-κε’ and Kakavas 2008, 11. 24. See Lykourgos 1856, 45ff. Brockhaus 1891: 158–161 deals extensively with the question of the linguistic differences between the manuscripts. Sathas 1868, 99–100, on the other hand, is deceived by Simonides and sees in the modern Greek of the manual an important example for the vernacular of the fifteenth century, its alleged time of writing. 25. For more details on this case see Mitsou and Diamantopoulou in Müller/Diamantopoulou/ Gastgeber/Katsiakiori-Rankl 2017, 71–86 and 27–53. 26. See Kakavas 2008, 12. 27. Simonides dates the life of the inventor of the heliotype Manouil Panselinos to the sixth century and specifically in 518 ad. In the Symais a second painter called Panselinos is mentioned, who acted around 1032–1085. In his work Νικολάου επισκόπου Μεθώνης, Λόγος προς τους Λατίνους [Speech of Nikolaos, bishop of Methoni, to the Latins] (Simonides 1858) he mentions three other painters of the same name. 28. Simonides 1853, § 64, 40–41 (source in Greek). 29. For a detailed discussion of this omission and a comparison of the French and the Simonideian editions, see Rangavis 1851, 554–555. 30. ‘Aτέλειαν του εκγαλλισθέντος χειρογράφου, ή εις κακοβουλίαν του μεταφραστού’ (Simonides, Αμάλθεια Nr. 508, quoted after Rangavis 1851, 554). Rangavis points out the problems of this argument and says that such a ‘malicious concealment’ is a ‘patriotism that transcends that of Curtius, or is incredible stupidity’ (Rangavis 1851, 554). 31. Oikonomos refers to the manuscript as antique (‘χειρόγραφον αρχαίον σώζεται’ Oikonomos 1849, 4, 218, Fn. α) and recognizes in the heliotype a form of iconography which he compares to the daguerrotype. See also Papadopoulos-Kerameus 1909, στ᾽-ζ’, Rangavis 1851, 553 Fn. β and Brockhaus 1891, 160 Fn. 4. Manouil Gedeon names Panselinos as the first inventor of photography: ‘πρώτος εφευρέτης της φωτογραφίας, γράψας μάλιστα, κατά την παράδοσιν, και βιβλίον περί αυτής’, Gedeon 1876, 53–54. See also Vasilaki 1999, 45. 32. The connection of
Simonides’ anachronistic technologies with the term ‘steampunk’ was first formulated by Siniosoglou 2016, 315. 33. Simonides 1853, § 64, 43 (source in Greek). In Hero of Alexandrias De Speculis, 22 occurs a similar description: Hero refers to a mirror on the ceiling of a room reflecting the view of the street through a tube that penetrates the wall of a certain building. The resident of this building was able to see, without being seen, the movement of passers-by outside. For further reading on mirrors and reflected images in Hero see Gerolemou and Bur in this volume. 34. For further reading on the camera obscura in art and science see Lefèvre (2007). For the early steps of photography in Greece see Xanthakis 1981. 35. For example, the work of the Russian art collector, amateur archaeologist and photographer Piotr Sevastianov (1811–1867) is well-known. He toured Athos at an early age, around 1851, 1852, and later more extensively from 1857–1860, and not only painted copious icons with several major Russian missions and other treasures, but also made numerous photographs; see Pyatnitsky 2011. 36. According to a theory advocated by the artist David Hockney and the physicist Charles M. Falco, art itself was revolutionized by the use of optical instruments, rather than solely due to 244
Notes to pp. 195–197 the development of artistic skills per se. In his book Secret Knowledge (2001) Hockney presented rich visual evidence to prove his theory, followed by an anthology of textual sources about vision and optics and the transcription of letters exchanged between various academics and himself during his research. It also includes pictures of Hockney’s Great Wall (2000), which organizes printed images of art history; remarkably it begins with an Italo-Byzantine mosaic of the twelfth century from Norman Sicily. Obviously, the main concern of the artist is to visualize the abrupt shift towards a more naturalistic style during the Italian Renaissance, which Hockney explains by the use of lenses and mirrors – the two basic elements of the modern camera – in painting. 37. Didron 1845, 7. 38. Simonides 1864, 51. 39. Grafton 1991, 45–47. 40. See Kladaki-Vratsanou 2009 and 2010. The manuscript is owned by his grandson
Loukas Kyramarios, who made it accessible online http://kyramarios.blogspot.com (accessed 15 December 2018). 41. This aspect of counterfeiting activities (also fake news, forged letters and documents) during the first years of the Independence War and in the early Greek State is the subject of a project I am leading at the University of Hamburg, financed by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
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Chapter 16 Acerbi, F. (2011), ‘The geometry of burning mirrors in Greek antiquity: Analysis, heuristic, projections, lemmatic fragmentation’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 65(5): 471–97. Beebe, W. (1938), 923 Meter unter dem Meerespiegel, Leipzig. Brockhaus, H. (1891), Die Kunst in den Athos-Klöstern, Leipzig.
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