Making Trouble: Strange Wooden Objects and the Early Modern Pursuit of Difficulty

This essay begins with a puzzle, a helical torus comprising seventy-six interlinked pieces and originally in the collection of Ferdinand II, Archduke of Tirol. Items of this sort emphasize construction praxis. Indeed, the complete lack of illusionistic content allows for little else in the way of an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal for early modern cultural studies 2013-01, Vol.13 (1), p.96-129
Main Author: ROTHSTEIN, BRET
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Archaeology
Artisans
Arts
Cultural studies
Design and construction
ESSAYS
Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor
Geometric shapes
Historic artifacts
Mathematical puzzles
Musical instruments
Paradox
Paradoxes
Puzzles
Renaissance art
Sadness
Social aspects
Tone
Torus (Geometry)
Treatises
Visual perception
Visual processing
Wood
Wooden toys
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Description
Summary:This essay begins with a puzzle, a helical torus comprising seventy-six interlinked pieces and originally in the collection of Ferdinand II, Archduke of Tirol. Items of this sort emphasize construction praxis. Indeed, the complete lack of illusionistic content allows for little else in the way of analysis. Nevertheless, the maker of this particular object not only avoided representational claims but also obscured the key piece, the means for completing the torus. Consequently, the object offers an almost pure test of visual processing via confusion. This is all the more noteworthy, given the place ofthat torus within Ferdinand II's Kunstkammer, a space dedicated to the cultivation of understanding. The result is a paradoxical object, simultaneously inviting and confounding attempts at even the most basic sorts of interpretation. My goal in this essay is to map the contours of that paradox and the adversarial tone that characterized it.
ISSN:1531-0485
1553-3786
1553-3786
DOI:10.1353/jem.2013.0000