Labyrinths and Mazes a Journey Through Art Architecture and Landscape
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This is a successful moving-picture show book involving (with a couple of exceptions) architectural-calibration mazes and labyrinths: meaning the kind y'all tin can walk through. That'due south a perfectly logical category, and my wife correctly surmised that I'd be interested by such a book. The pictures are mostly clear, and there a
This book was a rating quandary for me, considering I like information technology for one purpose, but it also disappointed and somewhat bellyaching me. So, take my rating every bit more than mixed than the three stars might suggest.This is a successful picture book involving (with a couple of exceptions) architectural-scale mazes and labyrinths: meaning the kind y'all tin can walk through. That's a perfectly logical category, and my wife correctly surmised that I'd be interested by such a book. The pictures are mostly clear, and at that place are also sometimes maps or accessory drawings for the more than complex entries. The main overview picture is ofttimes supplemented past interior views, or informative angles. The grouping and ordering likewise makes quite good sense, (conceptual, rather than historical) and it occasionally jumps from ancient to mod in a delightful way.
I very much like the range of examples. There are mazes of stone (Chartres, Amiens, others), of sod, of wood, glass, steel, hedges (similar the standard Renaissance garden maze), sunflowers, mirrors, water ice, snow, and common salt. That does not exhaust the list. One interesting feature is that several of the mod art-installation types play with interior windows, arches, and cutouts, adding to the dimensionality of the maze.
One fact that leapt out to me is the general absenteeism of a third dimension to the path through the mazes, which reflects my experience equally well. Garden mazes often accept
a cardinal raised observatory, and several of these have a identify where one can overlook the maze (and there are the interesting ones where the walls get lower toward the center). Only at that place'south 1 built on a hillslope, and a Finnish one that'southward cut into snow so that one slides downwardly the path rather than walking it, and that'southward well-nigh it. This isn't a complaint about the book, it'southward a remark on the tendency.
Clearly I'll take to use three-dimensional pathways in a story, as Borges's "The Library of Babel" does.
Forth with a good pick, and adept pictures, nosotros become some useful basic information virtually each example. Location, designer, appointment of creation, materials. Also the size, which ranges from ten anxiety to acres. The author besides tries to explicate what the artist intended, or might have intended, and this includes quotes. I note that two of the labyrinths were inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, which I appreciated.
And so, the virtue of the book is that information technology provides wonderful examples and a suggestive amount of information about them, and it pays attention to process. (We become some pictures of the construction process, and others of decay -- every bit with the water ice and snowfall versions.)
What disappointed me was that the preface and introduction presented the volume as more of a written report of labyrinths than it turned out to be, and that there are regrettable episodes of meaningless artspeak. Aye, there'south an fantabulous bibliography in the dorsum, and yep, Tatarella undoubtedly knows a lot more than well-nigh the history of these things than showed up on the page. But, in fact, the text is rather shallow and thin. Mazes tin have interesting psychological furnishings, which is why so many have been created. But these are vaguely referred to, rather than discussed or analyzed. The introduction tantalizes with some very interesting ideas, but the book has a lot of white space where those ideas could take been discussed.
I will admit that I had to swallow difficult at the very offset of the book, because in that location on the page before the title page is an epigraph:
Solvitur ambulando.
(It is solved by walking.)
-- St. Augustine
Now that'due south a lovely old quote, and it certainly fits with the subject of mazes. Simply it isn't a quote from St. Augustine, it'southward the Latin translation of a quote most Diogenes the Cynic (the story is related by Diogenes Laërtius, and Diogenes doesn't actually speak, he walks), who would have said it in Greek, and said it several hundred years before. Except he didn't say information technology, it would seem. There is no evidence that St. Augustine said this; information technology's i of those "preacher quotes" I used to hear from pulpits and on religious radio stations when I was a minister's son. Like the 1 that B.C. means Before Caesar. Somebody took bad notes one twenty-four hours, or didn't cheque them, and told an audience that St. Augustine said this thing. And then it got published in an unfootnoted tertiary work, and folks grabbed concord of it, and now it'south out in that location. You lot tin can tell that folks who tried to check the source (and couldn't) were affected by censor, only couldn't allow it go, so they attribute it to St. Augustine, but apply phrases like, "Now St. Augustine probably wasn't the kickoff to say it...". And now it has been made a mantra of folks doing the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage.
Dominion of writing: double-check your epigraphs, not using the Internet (though you may look at digitized copies of bodily main works via the Internet).
Anyway, her opening metaphorizes the journey of the scholarship on this book to the journeying through a contemplative maze. I was expecting more journeying in the book'southward text, but we mostly get individual stops.
One of the problems with sculptural art and compages is that they are not spoken/written language. But critics like to brand up phrases for how Art works, and a lot of the time it is painfully obvious that it'southward just blather. Maxim that some iron slabs with coal dumped betwixt them "encouraged visitors to examine the reasons backside their own path in life as they sought to achieve its middle" is purest malarky. I'd believe it if in that location were signs calling on the visitor to do so, but fe and coal ain't doing that work. Tell it to the Marines. Ditto for stuff like, "the essential humanist principle of the centrality of man and the question of how information technology tin coexist with the concept of the void--the absence of significant, as well every bit the human relationship between the self and the body; the latter becomes a bridge from the inner world of the homo soul to the outer world of space and the surroundings. In this sense, the labyrinth takes on new meaning past reflecting systems of oppression of the torso through standardization." Care to plow that 1 into syllogisms that make whatever sense at all???
There were around a dozen of these blatherfests, where more than white space would have been meliorate than trying to make stuff up. But I can't blame her for the discussion of "Boolean transformations" (perhaps a bad translation of "Boolean transforms"???) foisted on the public by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh (with Bollinger + Grohmann) to explain their very intriguing blueprint in Genk, Belgium. I'yard pretty sure they didn't actually remember who or what Boole and Boolean logic/algebra actually were when they concocted their explanation. It'due south a great labyrinth, though.
So, upside: I'll be revisiting this for inspiration; I'll exist educational activity it afterwards this month as an case of a source of story ideas.
Downside: Hits some actually sour notes, and doesn't quite reach for what it could hands accept been.
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Source: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/28634056
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