2026.10.14
volumes of the Piranesis
The library of the Ecole Polytechnique was one of the first institutions to project the image of [the] Piranesi[s] in France. The mathematician Gaspard Monge, its founder, wrote from Rome on 27 Prairial, Year V (15 June 1797):
We have purchased three sets of the works of Piranesi, the finest collections of engravings of the architectural monuments of ancient Rome. The first set is for the Bibliothèque Nationale, the second for the library of the Institut, and the third for our own.
Philippe Duboy, Lequeu: An Architectural Enigma, p. 47.
By 1797, Francesco Piranesi's business offered 25 volumes of engravings, 14 volumes published by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and 11 volumes published by Francesco himself.
 
Francesco Piranesi, Calcographie des Piranesi, ou, Traité des arts d'architecture, peinture et sculpture : développés par la vue des principaux monumens antiques et modernes, Paris, 1804.
Gaspard Monge may well have gotten the "three sets of the works of Piranesi" for a much reduced price in exchange for Francesco's safety--rather than being loyal to the Papacy, Francesco preferred being loyal to France. Subsequently, Francesco indeed came to hold a governmental position under the Roman Republic.
Rome, 15 June 1797
On June 15, 1797, Rome was the capital of the Papal States, ruling under the tension of Napoleon Bonaparte's First Italian Campaign.
While there is no single watershed battle or massive structural event tied specifically to Rome on this exact calendar day, the date sits directly within a critical geopolitical window for the city.
The French Threat: Just a few months prior, on February 19, 1797, Pope Pius VI was forced to sign the Peace of Tolentino with Napoleon. The treaty forced the Papal States to surrender vast territories, hundreds of works of art, and massive financial ransoms to the French Republic.
The Surrounding Expansion: Napoleon was actively reshaping the rest of Italy right outside of Rome's borders. Just one day prior, on June 14, 1797, he established the sister Ligurian Republic in Genoa, right after occupying and dissolving the ancient Republic of Venice in May.
The Prelude to Rome's Fall: The political unrest bubbling in Rome during June 1797 ultimately boiled over later that year. In December 1797, a riot in the city resulted in the death of French Brigadier-General Mathurin-Léonard Duphot. This gave France the pretext it needed to officially invade Rome, leading to the overthrow of the Pope and the proclamation of the short-lived revolutionary Roman Republic 15 February 1798.
2025.10.14
the apprentice in the sunshine of media magnification
Extracts from Pontus Hulten, Jennifer Gough-Cooper, Jacques Caumont, Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy 1887-1968 (1993).
17 February 1913. Monday, New York City
In the evening at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington and 25th, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors opens its "International Exhibition of Modern Art". The Armory Show, as it is known, has been organized with private funds by a small group of artists with the specific intention of breaking American complacency and apathy to Modern Art.
Francis Picabia, an exhibitor who has traveled with his wife from Paris, is the only artist from Duchamp's circle of friends who is present to witness the event.
23 February 1913. Sunday, New York City
In a group of drawings entitled "What Cesare saw at the Armory Show" published by the Sun, which includes cartoons of works by Matisse, Gauguin and Donoyer de Segonzac, Cesare has sketched his impression of the crowd before Nu descendant un Escalier
1 March 1913. Saturday, Albuquerque
On his return by train to San Francisco after visiting the Armory Show in New York, an art dealer Frederick C, Torrey of Vickery, Atkins & Torrey has second thoughts, disembarks from the train and swiftly sends a telegram to Walter Pach: "I will buy Duchamp nude woman descending stairway please reserve."
In New York on the same day, Arthur Jerome Eddy buys Portrait de Joueurs d'Echecs for $162. "[Eddy] was the first man in Chicago to ride a bicycle," noted Duchamp, "and the first to have his portrait painted by Whistler. That made his reputation! He had a very important law practice and collection of paintings."
2 March 1913. Sunday, New York City
After his purchase from the show yesterday, for $324 Arthur J. Eddy buys another Duchamp from the Armory Show: Le Roi et la Reine entourés de Nus vites.
20 March 1913. Thursday, New York City
Nu descendant un Escalier continues to inspire the cartoonists. Today the New York Evening Sun publishes J. F. Griswold's drawing Rude Descending a Staircase, subtitled "Rush Hour at the Subway". The cascading sequence of lines and geometrical interlocking shapes brilliantly pastiches the original paintings evocation of movement.
Not everyone agrees that the Nude gives the viewer a sense of progressive movement. J.N. Laurvik for his pamphlet, Is it Art?, writes that "...one is simply conscious of a series of flat figures, one overlapping the other, the sum total of which remains no less fixed than each separate unit and the attempt to achieve an illusion of motion without the concomitant physical and mechanical means employed by a moving picture results in an amusing failure, very entertaining as a new kind of parlour game but of very little value as art." Even if to some people it produces a sensation of movement, Laurvik declares, "It must be conceded that this, regarded as an end in itself, is a very puerile use of art and in no sense an amplification of its possibilities."
24 March 1913. Monday, Chicago
Just a week after its tumultuous closing ceremony in New York, 634 works from the celebrated Armory Show, including the four by Marcel Duchamp, Le Roi et la Reine entourés de Nus vites, Portrait de Joueurs d'Echecs, Nu descendant un Escalier, No.2 and Jeune Homme triste dans un Train, are on display again. An afternoon reception is held for members of the Art Institute which is followed by a gala in the evening, attended by society in force, for the benefit of the Municipal Art League.
Hanging in gallery 53, reserved for the Cubists, Duchamp's Nude is the one picture the public wants to see and it is the first illustration in the catalogue. The public flock to see the "Art Institute Circus", as it is dubbed by the Evening Post and revel in their bafflement, shock, hilarity or even fury roused by the new art.
4 April 1913. Friday, Chicago
Manierre Dawson, a young artist friend of Arthur Jerome Eddy's, buys Jeune Homme triste dans un Train from the Armory Show, which opened in Chicago on 24 March. It was the only one of Duchamp's four paintings in the exhibition not yet sold.
31 May 1913. Saturday, Paris
In the evening Duchamp attends a gathering of artists and poets at a tavern...
29 June 1913. Sunday, Puteaux
It has become a custom on a Sunday afternoon for the Duchamp brothers to receive their friends at 7 Rue Lemaître. As it is fine everyone gathers in the luxuriant garden shaded by the great horsechestnut tree. The painters Albert Gleizes and Francis Picabia have come today among the writers Jacques Nayral and Henri-Martin Barzun, who has brought his family. There are the usual diversions from the long and passionate discussions on art: archery, ball games including boules and spirobole, other games of skill such as the devil-on-two-sticks or cup-and=ball, and naturally Marcel's own board game of chance, the steeplechase.
*
Guillaume Apollinaire composes his manifesto L'Antitradition futuriste for Marinetti in which he says "shit" to various concepts and personalities past and present, and offers a rose to many of his avant-garde friends including Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Martin Barzun, etc.
2 July 1913. Wednesday, Neuilly-sur-Seine
In the wake of the famous Armory Show which closed in Boston on 19 May, Duchamp writes belatedly to Walter Pach in New York about the sale of his four paintings: "I am very happy and thank you for the dedication with which you have defended our paintings."
Mr Torrey, proud possessor of Nu descendant un Escalier has been in Paris: "A very kind man," Duchamp remarks to Pach, "he appeared to be very pleased to meet us." When he presented Torrey with Encore à cet Astre, the sketch which precluded the Nude, the American asked for confirmation that the work of the group at Puteaux was derived from Cézanne. "I'm sure most of my friends would say so," answered Duchamp, "and I know that he is a great man. Nevertheless, if I am to tell what my own point of departure has been, I should say that it was the art of Odilon Redon."
Is Pach [sic] working a lot? "I am terribly upset at the moment and I'm not doing anything at all," Duchamp admits. "These are short unpleasant moments." In August, however, he plans to spend some time in England.
8 August 1913. Friday, Herne Bay
Acting as chaperon, Marcel has accompanied his sister Yvonne across the Channel to the north Kent coast where she is taking a course in English at Lynton College.
26 August 1913. Monday, Herne Bay
"All is well. We will spend the first four days of September in London and 10 days with the family at Yport."
30 August 1913. Saturday, Herne Bay
In reply to he letter, which has been forwarded from Paris, Duchamp writes a note to Elmer MacRae, treasurer of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, acknowledging receipt of the remaining $600 due to him from the sale of his paintings at the Armory Show.
22 October 1913. Wednesday, Paris
Since his return to Paris after ten days holiday with the family at Yport, Marcel has moved from 9 Rue Amiral-de-Joinville in Neuilly to a brand new building at 23 Rue Saint-Hippolyte, not far from his friend Dumouchel, who lives at 44 Rue de la Clef in the 5ème arrondissement. In fact the building is still under construction, and for a while Marcel has to climb a ladder to reach his apartment.
On the new plaster-work, Marcel has stated plotting, full-scale, the definitive perspective composition of the Large Glass. Working mainly for the lower half from the vocal point of the line of the Bride's Clothes, he accurately plots the essential points of the Bachelor Machine, which is based on the first sketch on cardboard.
3 November 1913. Saturday, Paris
After attending classes at the Ecole des Chartes, Duchamp has been receiving instruction since May in the duties of under-librarian from the staff at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève , where Picabia's uncle Maurice Davanne is a librarian. It is due to his patronage that Duchamp is engaged on a temporary basis for two months to replace another librarian, M. Mortet, who is on leave. Considering it "a wonderful job" because he has so many hours to himself to continue his plans for the Large Glass, Duchamp is to receive 100 Francs (or 1,500 francs at present values).
20 November 1913. Thursday, Paris
Gabrielle Picabia has written Gertrude Stein whether they may bring their friend Marcel Duchamp to the Rue de Fleurus this evening.
Figured out...
...the story behind this image too.
2024.10.14
Reenacting The Largest Painting In The World
 
"A second coat of paint on the last two stripes, and then it's done. Thank god!"
2018.10.14
2D CAD data
   
18101401-04.db Germantown Avenue University of Architecture campus plan
2005.10.14
Jimmy Venturi's new website...
Is changing history the same as making history? I'd say the work of VSBA made history by their introduction of directions of architecture theory and practice other than the (then) status quo. Changing history is different and occurs in at least two different ways. History is changed when events are recorded and taught as history but are not really reflective of what actually happened, like the 'perversion' that Venturi feels happened to his theory, and, inversely, history is changed when a discovery occurs that nullifies established certainties, like the discovery of there actually being two renditions of Piranesi's Ichnographia Campus Martius.
2002
Denis Diderot "Encyclopedia"
Diderot, Denis. "Encyclopedia." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Philip Stewart. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004 (accessed 14 October 2026). Originally published as "Encyclopédie," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 5:635–648A (Paris, 1755).
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But knowledge of the language is the foundation of all these grand hopes; they will remain uncertain, if the language is not fixed and transmitted to posterity in all its perfection; and this object is the first of those it would behoove the encyclopedists to take seriously to heart. We have realized this too late, and this inadvertence has left its imperfection in our entire work. The language side of it has remained weak (I refer to language , and not to grammar); and for this reason it should be the principal subject of an article in which its labor is examined impartially, and the means of correcting its defects are sought. I shall therefore speak about language specifically and as I ought. I shall even venture to invite our successors to give some attention to this piece; and I shall hope that others for whom it is less directly intended will concede its importance and excuse its length.
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The institution of vocal signs to represent ideas, and of characters drawn to represent vocal sounds, was the initial seed of the progress of the human mind. A science or an art is born only through the application of our reflections to reflections previously made, and the comparison of our thoughts, observations, and experiences with the thoughts, observations, and experiences of our peers. Without the double convention which attaches ideas to sounds and sounds to letters, everything would have remained within man and died there; without grammars and dictionaries, which are the universal interpreters between peoples, everything would have remained concentrated within a single nation, and disappeared with it. It is these works which have permitted men's faculties to be compared and combined; they remain isolated without such an intermediary: an invention, however admirable, would have represented nothing more than the power of a solitary genius, or of a particular society, and never the energy of the species. A common idiom would be the sole means of establishing a correspondence that could extend to all parts of the human race, and ally them against nature, to which we must constantly do violence, in both the physical and moral domains. Assume that such an idiom were concerted and its form fixed: notions immediately become permanent; distances of time disappear; different places are contiguous; connections are created between all inhabited places in space in time, and all living and thinking beings are in contact with each other.
33/192
The language of a people furnishes its vocabulary, and the vocabulary is a fairly faithful register of all the knowledge of that people: by merely comparing the vocabulary of a nation at different times, one would get a sense of its progress. Each science has its name; each notion in the science has one as well: everything known in nature is denoted, just as everything that has been invented in the arts, and phenomena, and skills, and instruments. There are expressions both for entities outside ourselves, and for those inside us: both the abstract and the concrete ones have been named, both the particular and the general, the forms and the states, the existences, the successions, and the permanences. We say the universe ; we say an atom : the universe is the whole, the atom is its smallest part. From the general repertory of all causes down to the single being, everything has its sign: that which exceeds all limits, whether in nature or in our imagination; that which is possible and that which is not; that which is neither in nature nor in our understanding, both the infinitesimal and the infinitely great, extended, enduring, or perfect. The comparison of phenomena is called philosophy. Philosophy is practical or speculative: every notion derives either from sensation or from induction; every entity is either in the understanding or in nature: nature is put to use either by the naked sense, or by the sense aided by an instrument. The language is a symbol of this multitude of heterogeneous things: it indicates to the perceptive man how far people had gone in a given science, even in the most distant past. It can immediately be perceived that the Greeks abounded in abstract terms that the Romans did not possess, and that without these terms it was impossible for them to render what others had written about logic, morality, grammar, metaphysics, natural history, etc.; and we have made so much progress in all these sciences that it would be difficult to write about them, either in Greek or in Latin, in the state to which we have advanced them, without inventing a multitude of new signs. This single observation proves the superiority of the Greeks with respect to the Romans, and our superiority with respect to them all.
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In general all peoples, relatively to the progress of the language and taste, go through innumerable minor revolutions, events little noted, which are not recorded: one can detect that they have occurred only from the tone of contemporary authors, one either modified or dictated by passing circumstances. Where, for example, is the attentive reader who, encountering the following in an author: cantus autem et organa pluribus distantiis utuntur, non tantjm diapente, sed sumpto initio á diapason, concinnunt per diapente et diatessaron; et unitonum, et semitonium, itá ut et quidam putent inesse et diesin quF sensu percipiatur, would not immediately say to himself, we see there the course of our songs, the uncertainty we are in as to the possibility or impossibility of quarter-tone intonation. In other words, they did not know whether the Ancients did or did not possess an enharmonic scale? Did there then remain not a single musical author who could have resolved the difficulty? Were they therefore debating, at the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, essentially the same questions concerning melody that we do? And should it be found elsewhere that the authors were deeply divided over the exact enumeration of the sounds of the Greek language; that this matter had provoked very lively disputes, sed talium rerum considerationem grammatices et poetices esse ; vel etiam, ut quibusdam placet, philosophiF, would one not conclude that it was the same with the Romans as with us? Which is to say that, after treating the science of signs and sounds rather superficially, there was a time when the better minds recognized that there was more connection between that science and the science of things than they had at first suspected, and that one could regard such speculation as not at all unworthy of philosophy. This is precisely our situation; and it is by making a repertory in this way of words incidentally invoked, and foreign to the subject specifically treated by an author in whom they characterize only his own insights, his exactitude, and his indecision, that we could arrive at an illumination of the history of the progress of the human mind in earlier centuries.
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Authors sometimes do not themselves notice the impression of things taking place around them; but this impression is none the less real for that. Musicians, painters, architects, philosophers, etc., can have no disputes without the man of letters knowing about them; and reciprocally, no question can be debated in literature, without vestiges of it appearing in those who write on music, or painting, or architecture, or philosophy. They are like the reflections of a diffuse light falling on artists and men of letters, whom it makes glow. I know that their occasional abuse of expressions of which they misgauge the force, reveals that they were not up to date with the philosophy of their times; but the good mind that picks up these expressions, grabs a metaphor here, a new term there, elsewhere a word relative to a phenomenon, an observation, an experiment, or a system, has some perception of the state of prevailing opinions, the general movement that minds were beginning to receive from it, and the coloration they carried in the common language. And that, let it be said in passing, is what makes the authors of Antiquity so difficult to judge in matters of taste. The general persuasion of an opinion, a system, an accepted usage, the institution of a law, the habit of an exercise, etc., supply them with manners of speaking, thinking, rendering: comparisons, expressions, and figures of which the whole beauty could last only as long as the very thing that served as their basis. The thing passed on, and with it the discursive sparkle. Whence it follows that a writer who wishes to guarantee to his works an everlasting charm, cannot be too careful about borrowing his manner of speaking from stylish ideas, current opinions, prevailing systems, the arts in vogue; all these models are in mutation: in preference he will cling to permanent entities, the phenomena of water, earth, and air, the wonder of the universe, human passions, which are ever the same; and such shall be the truth, force, and immutability of his colors, that his works will inspire awe throughout the centuries, despite the disorder of his material, the absurdity of his notions, and all the defects that can be found in them. His particular ideas, his comparisons, metaphors, expressions, and images, by constantly bringing the reader back to nature which he never tires of admiring, will be so many partial truths by which his reputation will be sustained. People will not read him to learn to think; but they will have him in hand day and night to learn from him how to speak well. Such will be his fate, whereas so many works that are dependent only on cold good sense and heavy reasoning will perhaps be much admired, but little read, and will finally be forgotten, once a man gifted with fine genius and great eloquence has gone through them, and brought back into view truths previously austerely dry and repellent, clothed in nobler, more elegant, richer and more appealing garb.
36/192
These rapid revolutions that occur in things humanly instituted, and which will have such influence on the way posterity will judge productions handed down to them, are a powerful motivation for clinging, in an opus such as ours, where examples are often needed, to instances whose beauty is based on permanent models: without this precaution the models will pass, the truth of the imitation will no longer be felt, and the examples cited will cease to appear beautiful.
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The art of communicating ideas through the painting of objects must have naturally been the first to appear; that of communicating them by setting sounds down in letters is too delicate; it must have frightened the genius who first conceived it. Only after long trials did he begin to see that distinctly different sounds were not as numerous as they seemed, and ventured to think he could represent them all with a small number of signs. Yet the first means was not without its advantages, just as the second did not remain without flaw. Painting does not capture the operations of the mind; one would not make out among the objects distributed across a canvas, as when they are expressed in discourse, the linkages that constitute a judgment or syllogism; what makes of one of those entities the subject of a clause; what constitutes a quality of these entities as its attribute; what links the clause to another to turn it into reasoning, and this reasoning to another to make of it a discourse; in short, there are countless things of this nature that painting cannot depict; but it at least displays all those which it does depict: and contrariwise while written discourse denotes them all, it displays none of them. Paintings of beings are always very incomplete; but there is nothing ambiguous about them, because they are the very portraits of objects we have before our eyes. The letters of writing extend to everything, but they are conventional; they signify nothing in themselves. The key to pictures is in nature, and is available to anybody; that of alphabetical letters and their combination is a pact of which the secret has to be revealed; and it can never be entirely revealed, because in the expressions are delicate nuances which remain necessarily indeterminate. Moreover, while painting is permanent, it is only of an instantaneous state. If it undertakes to express the simplest movement, it becomes obscure. If we see Fame on a trophy with her wings extended, holding a trumpet in one hand and in the other a crown held over a hero's head, we cannot tell whether she is bestowing the crown or taking it away: we must look to the story to resolve the ambiguity. On the other hand, whatever the variety of an action, there is always a certain collection of terms to represent it, which one cannot say for any row or group of figures. Add as many of these figures as you like, there will be interruption: the action is continuous, but the figures will only provide it in separate instants, leaving to the viewer's discernement to fill in the voids. There is the same incommensurability between all physical motion and all real representations, as between certain lines and series of numbers. However many new terms are added between one term and another, since these terms always remain distinct and do not touch, leaving an interval between any two of them, they can never correspond to certain known quantities. How can one measure any continuous quantity by a discrete quantity? Similarly, how can one represent a continuous action by images of separate instants? But do not these terms which remain necessarily unexplained in any language, the radicals, correspond rather exactly to those intermediate instants which painting cannot represent? And is it not approximately the same defect in the two cases? We are thus blocked in our project for transmitting knowledge, by the impossibility of making the entire language intelligible. How do we repertory grammatical roots? Once repertoried, how do we explain them? Is it worth our trouble to write for the centuries to come, if we are not in a position to make ourselves understood? Let us resolve these difficulties.
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Here is first my opinion on the manner of identifying radicals. Maybe there is some method, some philosophical system, by means of which one would locate a great number of them: but that system seems to me difficult to invent; and whatever it is, its application seems to me subject to error, because of my well-founded habit of being suspicious of all general rules in matters of language. I would rather implement a technical means, all the more so that this technical means is a necessary consequence of the production of an encyclopedic dictionary.
39/192
First, those who collaborate on this opus must oblige themselves to define everything, without exception. Once that is done, the editor will only have to separate the terms when the same word will be taken for a type in one definition, and for a difference in another: it is evident that the necessity of this double usage constitutes the vicious circle, and is the limit of definitions. When all the words have been repertoried, it will be found by examination that of the two terms which are defined by each other, it is sometimes the more general, and sometimes the less general, which is type or difference; and it is evident that it is the more general one that should be considered one of the grammatical roots. Whence it follows that the number of grammatical roots will be precisely half the number of terms repertoried; for of two definitions of a word, one must be admitted as good and legitimate, in order to show that the other is a vicious circle.
40/192
Next let us consider the manner of fixing the notion of these radicals: it seems to me there is but one means, and still it is not as perfect as one would wish; not that it leaves ambiguity in those cases where it is applicable, but in that there can be cases to which it cannot be applied, however skillfully one goes about it. This means is to relate a living language to a dead one: there is but one dead language which can be an exact, invariable, and common measure for all men now living or who shall live, among those they speak and will speak. As that idiom exists only in authors, it no longer changes; and the effect of that characteristic is that its application is always the same, and always equally known.
1994.10.14
forms of imaginations
…the whole issue of metabolism and how metabolism is a driving force behind [a] form of imagination. …the nature of possible future forms of imagination...
1951.10.14
1951. Sunday, New York City
In the afternoon at three Duchamp meets Monique Fong.
Ephemerides
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