COLLECTION NAME:
David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Record
Author:
Welser, Marcus
Date:
1682
Short Title:
Christiani Daumii Spicilegium Crticum Ad Epistolam Porphyrii.
Publisher:
W. Mauritii et filiorum J. A. Endterorum
Publisher Location:
Nuremberg
Type:
Text Page
Type:
Diagram
Obj Height cm:
34
Obj Width cm:
23
Full Title:
Christiani Daumii Spicilegium Crticum Ad Epistolam Porphyrii.
List No:
15733.069
Page No:
(8-9)
Series No:
69
Publication Author:
Welser, Marcus
Pub Date:
1682
Pub Title:
Opera Historica et Philologica, Sacra et Profana. Nuremberg, W. Mauritii et filiorum J. A. Endterorum, 1682
Pub Reference:
Brunet, IV, 824 and V, 1117; Sabin, 102615; Grasse V, 246 and VII, 275. For the full text of the book, see https://archive.org…
Pub Note:
"First edition of the complete works of Marcus Welser which contains the remarkable impression of twenty-six square poems from the “Panegyric of Constantine”. This eulogy in verse to the glory of the founder of Constantinople was written in the first half of the 4th century by Porphyrius and first published in 1590 in the Epigrammata of Pierre Pithou. The poems which compose it are printed here for the first time under this typographic layout of a great originality (equidistant capitals, red and black) at the crossroads of the Greek "technopaegnia" and the medieval "carmina figurata". Alongside classic calligrams, there are several grid poems (“carmina cancellata”) where “lineaments” printed in red draw compositions abstract and complex geometric shapes most often related to mosaic art. “The poem, made up of lines of strictly identical length, most often includes as many verses that many letters in each of these. At Porfyrius, as later at Fortunat or Raban Maur who imitated him, the figures are therefore generally inscribed in perfect squares of thirty-five or thirty-seven letters aside. No longer drawn by the silhouette of the block of worms, they are made up of alignments of letters to be located inside the grid, as in certain exercises similar to crossword puzzles. While this approach is more like an enigma than an acrostic, the care taken by the author to facilitate the recognition of the letters, retained both as lineaments of the figure and components of a second poem inside the first, indicates that this exercise literature was designed to be enjoyed as a feat. In the first good edition of the Panegyricus, that of Marc Welser (1595), the lineaments were underlined with a colored line. But usually, and from the first edition of Raban Maur's "carmina cancellata", the "textured" figures were printed in red. The forms generated by the letters of poems of this genre are relatively limited: vertical, horizontal, diagonal, these are the three directions allowed by the poem-grids. Despite these constraints, Porfyrius above all created a series of relatively complex geometric compositions, most often related to mosaic art. The most remarkable is a galley whose mast is constituted by the monogram of Christ, where the lineaments of letters form ramifications that offer several possible paths to reading, and therefore several meanings for the same departure of verse. This intrusion of combinatorics into the poems of Porfyrius would no doubt provide members of the Oulipo an additional reason to appreciate a poetry that presents so many points common with the experiences they like to practice. (Antoine Coron, “Before Apollinaire, twenty centuries of figurative poems”, The Word and the Rest, 2005, pp. 16-18). Born in Augsburg in 1558 to a family of wealthy merchants who owned and ruled Venezuela from 1528 to 1555, the historian and philologist Marcus Welser played an important role in his native city, was their lawyer and magistrate then consul and mayor. A student in Rome of Marc-Antoine Muret, Welser maintained epistolary relations with humanists, such as Juste-Lipse, Scaliger or Peiresc, and scientists, like Ortelius or Galileo - for whom he arbitrated the debate with the Jesuits on sunspots. Besides his historical, religious and humanist works, most of which had been published separately in Augsburg, or in Venice, with the Aldes - his works focused above all on the history of Bavaria, of which he studied antiquities - his correspondence included in the Opera testifies to these most illustrious. He died in Augsburg in 1614. The remarkable illustration includes a frontispiece and a portrait of the author, 2 out-of-text maps on double page (Venezuela and Vindelicia, a former Germanic region), 29 engravings and 14 maps on double-page for the Table of Peutinger (representing the road network cursus publicus of the Roman Empire, discovered in 1494 and first published for two short fragments only, by Marcus Welser for this edition) headbands and tailpieces." (Bonnefoi Livres Anciens, 2023)
Pub List No:
15733.000
Pub Type:
Geography Book
Pub Height cm:
34
Pub Width cm:
23
Image No:
15733069.jp2
Authors:
Welser, Marcus
