---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carrie Bergman <[log in to unmask]>

NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Dr. Peter M. Lukehart
+1-(717) 245-1709


  "...the soul is like the hand; for the hand is an instrument of
  instruments, and in the same way the mind is the form of forms."
					Aristotle, De Anima, 3.8

>From the earliest surviving figurative imagery to the present day,
depictions of the hand symbolize human or divine action, power,
creativity, intelligence, and manual skill. An original exhibition,
WRITING ON HANDS: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, explores
the use and importance of these images in codifying and extending
knowledge-from the mathematical and musical to the astrological and
spiritual realms-in 15th- through 17th- century Europe.  WRITING ON HANDS
examines representations of the hand independent of the body, as figures
of both generic and individual human identity.

Of special note to those with interests in early music are:  the essay
"The Singing Hand" (with reference to sight singing and the Guidonian
hand) as well as several catalogue entries on images from the 15th-century
"Micrologus," Hugo Spechtshart, Balthasar Prasperg, Jean Cousin, the
Younger, Marin Mersenne, and Jan Mombaer, all of which were written by
Susan Forscher Weiss of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, The Johns
Hopkins University.

The Trout Gallery of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania is sponsoring
WRITING ON HANDS which opens there on September 8, 2000 and runs through
November 25, 2000; it will then travel to The Folger Shakespeare Library in
Washington, DC, opening on December 13, 2000, and closing on March 4, 2001.
The curator of the exhibition is Dr. Claire Richter Sherman, author of
Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in Fourteenth-Century
France.  Dr. Sherman is Project Head Emerita of Sponsored Research in the
History of Art, published by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual
Arts, National Gallery of Art.  She has published widely on medieval art and
art historiography and lectures throughout the United States and Europe.

Dr. Sherman has assembled prints, manuscripts, and printed books from the
11th through the 17th centuries to examine woodcuts, engravings and
drawings featuring representations of the hand inscribed with, or
surrounded by, lines, letters, words, symbols and numbers to support the
thesis that visual representation plays a vital role in cognitive
processes.  Organized according to theme, more than eighty works in the
exhibition embrace such fields as anatomy, religion, philosophy,
psychology, music theory, mathematics, literature, emblematics, and the
occult.  While referring to relevant medieval traditions, the time frame
of the exhibition-1466 to 1700-shows how, in conjunction with developing
print technology, major currents of thought, such as humanism, the
Reformation, and the scientific revolution, affected representations of
the inscribed hand. The very earliest works of authors, like the Venerable
Bede, Peter of Rosenheim and Hugo Spechtshart, though known originally in
manuscript form, achieved wider influence in printed formats.  The
illustrated book served to disseminate widely all types of established
knowledge, old and new, rational and irrational.  The subsequent
development of accompanying visual imagery underscores the lasting
importance of pictorial representation in cognitive processes.

Dr. Peter M. Lukehart, Director of The Trout Gallery, says he is "proud to
host such a distinguished collection of early modern prints, books, and
manuscripts for this ambitious exhibition."  Included in the exhibition
are woodcuts from Albrecht Dürer, etchings by Rembrandt, engravings after
Gérard de Lairesse and Hendrik Goltzius, and books by Robert Fludd, Johann
Hartlieb, Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey. The objects are drawn from
the collections of the The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, The
Folger Shakespeare Library, Library of Congress, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, National Gallery of Art, National Library of Medicine,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Pierpont Morgan Library and The Walters
Art Gallery.

Claire Sherman suggests that the underlying function of the images
collected for this exhibit are to understand, order, and recall abstract
concepts related to universal human experience and culture.  These images
of the hand serve as iconic metaphors, bodily mnemonics and cognitive maps
encompassing processes of association, memory and recollection. The
exhibition themes are:

-  Reading the Writing on Hands, the first part of the exhibition,
   introduces the topic's universal associations.
-  Mentor, Map, and Metaphor explores the hand as a distinctively generic
   and individual human trait.
-  Identity, Creativity, and Intelligence shows the hand's identification
   with notions of creativity, intelligence, skill, agency and power.
-  Medical imagery then explores the material qualities of the hand.
-  The Handiwork of the Creator considers anatomical prints and book
   illustrations of the body as evidence of design by a supreme divine or
   natural authority (The Noblest Creation) and the hand as specific
   evidence of such intent in The Instrument of Instruments.
-  Messengers of the World examines the connections between the hand, brain,
   senses, and memory.  Of particular importance are prints and book
   illustrations that demonstrate the various interpretations of The Sense
   of Touch.  Arranged in an ordered sequence as different ways of
   Inscribing Memory, a series of images reveal their essential role in
   cognitive processes.
-  Knowledge on Hand discusses the hand as a teaching and learning device.
-  Manipulating Time demonstrates how the revival of an ancient system of
   coded finger gestures that enables counting to a million became
   associated with reckoning of secular and sacred operations, including
   computing the liturgical calendar.  Related to the calculating hand,
-  Steps to Singing surveys the so-called Guidonian hand as a popular method
   to learn and teach basic principles of solmization and music theory.
-  Companion of Eloquence investigates the appearance in the 17th century of
   visual representations of coded gestures designed for rhetorical and
   dramatic expression, as well as systems of fingerspelling for teaching
   the deaf.
-  The Whole World in the Hand first introduces the powerful concept and
   imagery of man as an ordered and harmonious microcosm of the universe.
   One example, the depiction of zodiacal man, employs astrological and
   medical analogies in The Body as Microcosm.  Next,
-  Signs upon the Hand reveals how the hand represents both the corporeal
   and spiritual relations of the body to the macrocosm.  From its
   introduction in the 12th century, chiromancy, later known as palmistry,
   used the natural marks of the hand to divine the character and fate of
   individuals.
-  The Hand of the Philosopher explores alchemy, a pervasive human quest to
   achieve material and spiritual purification of base natural materials.
   Images reveal the complex search for knowledge that combines premodern
   chemical methods to achieve medical benefits and wealth with Christian
   and other mystical beliefs.
-  In the exhibition's final section, imagery of Guiding Hands from the
   early 16th through the 17th century functions as a site of meditation
   and reflection.  Hands provide the mnemonic scaffolding for spiritual
   exercises as Defenders of Faith, or as agents or performers of 
   religious acts.  Hands in secular emblem books behave as Guardians of
   Morals, uniting visual and verbal meaning to emphasize a series of
   ethical and political maxims.

A fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue written by Dr. Sherman and edited
by her and Dr. Peter M. Lukehart will accompany the exhibit.  Essays were
contributed by internationally known scholars Brian Copenhaver, University
of California, Martin Kemp, University of Oxford, Sachiko Kusukawa,
Trinity College, Cambridge University and Susan Forscher Weiss, Peabody
Conservatory, The Johns Hopkins University.  The catalogue will be
available at the exhibition; for information on obtaining the catalogue
(US$35.00 plus p+h) please contact Stephanie Keifer at [log in to unmask]
or +1-(717)245-1344.

This exhibition is funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the
Arts. Additional support is provided by the generosity of the Ruth Trout
Exhibition Fund, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the
participation of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.



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