Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (12 page)

 

If a mouse urinates in the sea, is there a risk of shipwreck?

Are mathematical points receptacles for spirits?

Is a belch an exhalation of the soul?

But overall, the response to Kircher's magnificent illustrated compendium was positive, and so was the way in which Jesuit authorities believed his prodigious intellectual output reflected on the order and on the Church. Pretty soon they relieved him of his teaching duties, not to keep students safe from the work of this Egyptian wanderer, but to free him to do more of it.

—

KIRCHER NOW SHIFTED
his attention from the entirety of optics to the entirety of acoustics and sound. Or rather, as he later wrote, there was a “
desire of joining to our work on Optics a work on Acoustic faculties with like variety and opulence of evidence.” The reason was simple: “I discovered so great a mutual affinity between the two that I have concluded that light is nothing other than a certain consono-dissonance for the eyes, while sound . . . is a certain shadow-light for the ears.”

In the course of producing his next massive tome,
Musurgia Universalis sive Ars Magna Consoni et Dissoni
(
Universal Music-making, or The Great Art of Consonance and Dissonance
), Kircher studied the ears and the vocal organs of humans, animals, and birds, and began cataloging the history of musical instruments and musical styles. He also joined with a craftsman named Matteo Marione to replace the old water-powered organ in the gardens of the Palazzo Quirinale. And he started experimenting with what he called “
tone architecture”—“the reflection of sounds and the multiplication of the same.”

Guided by the “great similitude of light and sound,” he applied his (as it turned out, incorrect) understanding of reflected light to the reflection of sound. After a number of trials, Kircher developed “a conical tube, or, if you will, one projected into a spindle,” that seemed to carry sound better than other designs. He subsequently installed a very large version of one of these tubes—“joined with iron sheets about twenty-two palms in length”—in the wall between his cubiculum on the second floor of the Collegio and the interior gate facing a garden downstairs.

“
Should need arise for our porters to inform me of some matter,” he explained, “whether concerning the arrival of some visitors or any other affair, instead of taking the trouble to reach my [quarters] through the various labyrinthine windings of the house, they would speak to me while standing within the security gate, as I lingered in the remote recess of my bed chamber, and, as if present, they reported distinctly and clearly to me whatever they might wish; and I, in turn, was responding to the matter with the same tone of voice through the mouthpiece of the tube.”

It also came in handy as an eavesdropping device. “I daresay that no one in the garden was able to say anything in a voice above a whisper that I did not hear within my bed chamber,” he recalled.

Among hundreds of other acoustical innovations and musical machines included in
Universal Music-making
, eventually published in 1650, the book described the glass harp (goblets arranged by the level of liquid within them, played by passing a moistened finger around the rims) and the Aeolian or wind harp (a box-shaped stringed instrument placed in a window and played by the breeze). One instrument that doesn't seem to have been included—at least no one can find it in the twelve hundred pages of Latin that make up the two-volume work—
is the infamous cat piano with which Kircher has so long been associated. But Kaspar Schott, his friend and disciple from Würzburg, did publish an account of it. Schott wrote that a “distinguished and ingenious” person, who sounds like Kircher, constructed one of these pianos to dispel the melancholy of an unnamed prince, who sounds a bit like the Prince-Elector of Mainz. This person

captured living cats, all of differing size and consequently of differing shrillness and depth of voice; these, in a certain chest constructed with effort devoted to this purpose, he enclosed in such a way that their tails, after they had been stretched through apertures, were fastened and led through to certain determined channels. Upon these he furnished keys constructed with most slender pricks in the place of mallets. . . . In proportion to their differing tonal magnitude he arranged the cats so that individual keys corresponded to their individual tails and he established the instrument in a place suitable for the relaxation of the Prince. When it was finally played, it produced the sort of harmony as the voices of cats are wont to supply. For when the keys had been depressed by the fingers of the Organist, since with their very pricks they punctured their tails, the cats, driven to a state of madness, thundering with piteous voice now deep, now shrill, were producing a harmony arranged from the voice of cats, which thing both moved men to laughter and was able even to drive the mice themselves to the fields.

Kircher was not really a musician; he played no instrument, feline or otherwise, but he was an opinionated aficionado of music at a time and place, baroque Rome, of extraordinary musical activity—not only the opera, but orchestration, and the trombone, for example, were new. As a mathematician with training in the ancient study of harmonics, he had little patience for what he heard in the churches, chambers, and theaters by composers and singers who lacked rigor and grounding in musical intervals. Kircher conceded that “
notable abuses and faults” were impossible to avoid “amid so great a throng of musicians.” Still, he bemoaned the situation in which “
such wretched compositions, prone to so many errors and defects, should appear every day, often even in the leading places.” He also complained about hearing “
the same twittering, the same cluckings, the same phrases everywhere until you feel sick and angry.”

The cat piano

As a partial solution to the problem, Kircher offered readers a do-it-yourself system for writing music according to proper mathematical rules. “
The mechanical production of music,” he explained, “is nothing other than a certain closely defined method I have invented, by which anyone, even if he has no musical knowledge, may, by varied application of music-making tools, compose tunes.” It was a project that he'd been working on since his time in Würzburg with Schott. Based on the combination techniques of Ramon Llull—the same techniques he'd employed to make his strange calculating machine on Malta—the procedure was actually limited in scope to four-part polyphonic settings for voice. Nevertheless, an almost endless number of compositions could result from combining hundreds of short musical phrases in various styles and pitches, which Kircher represented as values on numerical tables. Kircher even used the elements of the system to build a number of music-computing cabinets for presentation as gifts to certain patrons and dignitaries. These “musarithmetic arks,” as he called them, were handsome wooden boxes containing many columns of long removable slats onto which the values had been imprinted; as the slats were pulled out, music was pieced together.

Most of the music theory and a lot of other material contained in
Universal Music-making
was actually lifted right from Marin Mersenne's large work on music. (“
Father Kircher devoured my book
Harmonie Universelle
that I lent him here in four days,” Mersenne wrote during a visit to Rome in 1645, “and says he is thrilled.”) But for readers, that only added to the value of this encyclopedia, which served as the standard musical text in Europe well into the eighteenth century.

Kircher's original contributions to his own book are in fact well respected. In addition to creating new classifications of musical styles, Kircher was apparently the first to articulate the “doctrine of the affections” on which so much later baroque music operated. Kircher believed that music's great purpose was to echo and evoke human emotions or affective states, but that this purpose was best achieved through formal rhetorical technique and structure. A German translation published in 1662 made
Universal Music-making
especially important in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, where, as the modern Italian composer Roman Vlad believes, it had “
a more or less direct influence on Johann Sebastian Bach.”

11

Four Rivers

K
ircher's success with magnetism, optics, and music was “
grounds for praise of God,” but it also offered surprising “fodder for tribulation,” as he put it, and may have even brought about some paranoia. (The real reason for installing an eavesdropping device in his bedchamber?) Those who had always been skeptical of him, he recalled, “attacked me anew with fresh accusations.” The charge: He'd been concentrating on those other subjects because he wasn't getting anywhere with his most important work, “as if abandoning all hope of addressing Hieroglyphics on account of its impenetrable difficulty.”

Kircher was now in his mid-forties, and it had been much more than a decade since he began trying to decipher the Egyptian system. In the meantime, his vision for
Egyptian Oedipus
had grown more and more ambitious, and more and more expensive to execute. It would have to be longer than he originally thought. Many exotic typefaces were required. More artists and engravers were needed to render the illustrations. Now, he said, God provided “an utterly marvelous manner” for him to resume his hieroglyphic work and to “elude the empty machinations” of his enemies. Events led not only to the publication of
Egyptian Oedipus
but to Kircher's collaboration with Gianlorenzo Bernini on what many people regard as his masterpiece, the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Fountain of the Four Rivers) in the Piazza Navona, one of the most well-known public squares in the world.

In 1647, Pope Innocent X decided, “for the immortality of his own name,” as Kircher wrote, to re-erect an Egyptian obelisk in the center of the piazza, which occupies the oblong site of the old Circus Agonalis, a stadium where ancient Roman games were held. Innocent and other members of the Pamphilj family—including his powerful sister-in-law, Donna Olimpia, called the
papessa
, or “lady pope”—were in the process of combining their existing properties on the piazza into one great palazzo appropriate to their exalted station. The obelisk was meant to elevate the aesthetics and the stature of the entire square in advance of the Church's Jubilee Year celebration in 1650.

“Since he had heard that I possessed skill in the Egyptian alphabet and Hieroglyphics, and that I was called to Rome for that reason,” Kircher recalled, Innocent “fetched me to himself.” Those who met the pope tended not to forget it. Innocent was ugly. (“He was tall in stature, thin, choleric, splenetic, with a red face, bald in front with thick eyebrows bent above the nose,” a Roman of the time reported. “His face was the most deformed ever born among men.”)

“Father,” Innocent said to Kircher, “we have decided to erect an obelisk, a stony mass of not small size. Yours will be the task of transforming it to life with your interpretation.”

At the time, this obelisk still “lay thrown to the ground and broken into five parts” outside town at the Circus of Maxentius, where it had been erected about twelve hundred years before. It was going to have to be made whole again. “And since from the corrosion of its letters the obelisk was greatly defective and several outlines of figures were lacking,” Kircher explained, “His Holiness wished that it be restored to its unimpaired condition by putting upon me the task of filling in all the missing portions in accordance with my knowledge.”

Kircher imagined his detractors whispering to each other: “Let us just see if he has experience in the knowledge of Hieroglyphics or if he can genuinely be of good use in addressing these figures.” As if to prove to these skeptics just how much “experience in the knowledge of Hieroglyphics” he had, he quickly produced five hundred pages on the subject.

It was actually Francesco Borromini, Bernini's gloomy nemesis, who was expected to receive the commission for the obelisk's base. Innocent wanted a big fountain; he'd already put Borromini in charge of diverting water to the site from the Acqua Vergine, a still-functioning ancient Roman aqueduct, and he'd already given tacit approval to Borromini's concept: a fountain that would represent the four principal rivers of the four continents known at the time. Bernini was out of favor, not least because of his association with the Barberini family, but Innocent changed his mind about the commission after seeing a model of Bernini's stunning design. Today it's all the more stunning to consider, given that Kircher played an important role in its development. “
I would even venture to say,” writes one Bernini scholar, “that it was only through Kircher that Bernini . . . managed to displace Borromini.”

Bernini stuck to the four-rivers idea, which was meant to represent the centrality of the Church and the flow of faith to all the corners of the globe, as if carried along on the waters of the Danube, the Nile, the Ganges, and the Río de la Plata. (The Americas were regarded as a single entity, and although the Portuguese had been navigating the Amazon for years, the Río de la Plata was more famous.) And for the details of animal and plant life along the rivers he'd never seen, he consulted Kircher.

Kircher had never seen them, either. (Were Bernini and others in Rome still under the impression that Kircher had actually been to the East? Maybe they were.) Nevertheless, he had an emerging reputation as an authoritative polymath. He was the figure in Rome with whom a growing number of other, some might say “actual,” authorities on a range of subjects chose to correspond, and he was the Jesuit to whom missionaries most frequently sent reports, artifacts, and natural specimens. One of those specimens was the preserved body of what's now called a giant armadillo, a South American animal that looks even more unpleasant than its smaller cousin, with bony plating, scales, and large claws. In the well-known engraving of Kircher's museum, it's hanging from the ceiling. Kircher may not have been entirely clear on this animal's bearing and habitat, however, because it seems to have inspired the carved sea creature that stands upright in the water on the American side of the fountain, referred to as the “
Tatu of the Indies” by a seventeenth-century chronicler of Bernini's life and work. (
Tatú
is Spanish for “armadillo.”)

The effect of Bernini's fountain goes well beyond its fairly straightforward imagery and symbolism (there's a dove on the very top of the obelisk, for example, that represents the pope). The rocky travertine base is made to look like a crush of tectonic forces, a mountain in the making. Water shoots from cracks and crevices all around it, and it's carved out in such a way that you can see through it on all four sides. Each main chunk of the base supports one of four giant marble river gods, but the interior of the form on which the fifty-five-foot obelisk rests contains mostly a lot of water and empty space. As the same seventeenth-century writer put it, “
One marvels not a little to see the immense mass of the obelisk erected on a rock so hollowed out and divided and observe how—speaking in artistic terms—it seems to stand upon a void.”

The concept is evidently based on conclusions that Kircher had reached since exploring the caves, underground seas, and passageways of Malta and Sicily, not to mention the deep crater of Mount Vesuvius. As he later explained, “
The whole Earth is not solid but everywhere gaping, and hollowed with empty rooms and spaces, and hidden burrows.” Deep down, it held many oceans and fires, interconnected by passages that reached all the way to its core, and there were many entrances and exits in the ground and the floor of the ocean. In the case of the latter, enormous quantities of water passed back and forth through them. “The sea,” he wrote, “by the winds and pressure of the air or the motion of the estuating tides, ejaculates, and casts the waters through subterraneous or underground burrows into the highest waterhouses of the mountains.” In other words, Kircher believed that mountains were hollow and served as great reservoirs. Water pushed its way out through the sides of the mountains like the water of Bernini's fountain, flowing down the slopes as rivers and streams, and completing the cycle by emptying into the seas.

But the fountain evokes an even larger and more primal natural process, as if capturing the moment when an animating force or a shock of the divine permeates the material world. Bernini may have known that obelisks, with their long, tapering shapes, were said to represent rays of sunlight. And Kircher would have been pleased to inform him of the magnetic manner in which he believed the rays of the sun gave life, the way in which sunlight acted as “
the lodestone of heaven, drawing all to it.” Light “passes through everything,” he wrote in
The Great Art of Light and Shadow
, and “by so passing through, it shapes and forms everything; it supports, collects, unites, separates everything. All things which either exist or are illuminated or grow warm, or live, or are begotten, or freed, or grow greater, or are completed or are moved, it converts to itself.” Not by chance, Kircher's reading of the hieroglyphics on the obelisk revealed that the ancient Egyptians, inscribers of sacred wisdom, basically agreed: In brief, his translation describes the emanations of a “Solar Genius” and the lower entities that are “drawn,” “fructified,” and “enriched” by the diffusion of its energy.

The important thing is that Bernini wouldn't have been totally bemused by all this. Kircher's animistic, Neoplatonic, and catholic views were also still somehow Catholic, and they were characteristically baroque. According to art historian Simon Schama,
Bernini “was forever inventing new ways in which the unification of matter and spirit, body and soul, could be visualized and physically experienced.” While “
it is difficult to trace the exact degree of closeness between the sculptor and the Egyptologist, something like this belief—the revelation of divinely ordained unities, tying together the different elements of living creation—is surely the controlling concept behind Bernini's immense creation.”

—

WORK ON THE FOUNTAIN STARTED
—with some pieces of the obelisk dragged by water buffalo, and others moved with winches, canvases, and horses—as Rome began to suffer from a grain shortage. When taxes were levied to help pay for the project, people became angry. Rhymes of protest began to appear overnight on the blocks of travertine and the chunks of obelisk lying in the piazza: the people didn't want
fontane
(fountains), they wanted
pane
(bread). Jesuits began giving out bread, soup, and wine to the poor, along with tickets that could be turned in for alms at a later date. When that day came, so many people showed up that “
a terrible thing happened,” a Roman man reported. “Some of the poor died, suffocated by the crowd; a pregnant woman fell unconscious, others broke their legs, and in short many were injured.”

General hunger notwithstanding, the fountain kept going up, and the Pamphilj pope paid for the publication of Kircher's lavish
Pamphilian Obelisk
, a book that serves for all intents and purposes as the first volume of his
Egyptian Oedipus
. Kircher used it as a kind of sales tool. As he told it, when Emperor Ferdinand III in Vienna got a look at the handsome tome that Kircher had dedicated to Pope Innocent, “
he sent to me most eloquent letters by which he kindly impelled me to take up anew my work on
Oedipus Aegypticus
.” Through an intermediary, Kircher explained to Ferdinand that because of all the special typefaces and necessarily elaborate engravings, the book “would not be able to be produced for less than three thousand scudi,” almost $200,000 in twenty-first-century money. Ferdinand agreed to release the “altogether worthy amplitude of his munificence” on the project, and chipped in a yearly hundred-scudo stipend.

In further correspondence with Vienna,
Kircher cited a tremor in his right hand as an additional challenge to completing the work. He was approaching fifty. It's not known if this tremor was the result of a stroke, of an old injury he suffered climbing cliffs and volcanoes, or of having scratched his obsessive script over thousands of pages of parchment. It's also not clear how serious the problem really was, since he finished off thousands and thousands more pages in his own hand over the next twenty-eight or twenty-nine years, before the tremor became totally debilitating. But it was reason enough to request a dedicated assistant to help with the manuscript. Kircher may have hoped all along to send for his friend Kaspar Schott. In any event, Ferdinand agreed to pay, and Schott was brought to Rome from Palermo.

It's possible to imagine that Kircher rarely thought of himself as a refugee from the war in Germany anymore. But it's more likely that memories from those early years never left him. And they probably contributed to the conceptual all-inclusiveness, the desire to bring everything together in harmony, that so often showed in his work. The war caused “
the devastation of my entire fatherland,” he wrote in his autobiography. And he was basically right, since it led to the death of about a third of the entire population. (That's an average. In many places it was much more.) In 1648, after years of negotiations, preliminary truces, and various settlements between the Swedes and the Saxons, the French and the Bavarians, the Spanish and the Dutch, as well as bargaining by the Protestant German states and a final Swedish siege of Prague, Kircher's patron, Ferdinand III, agreed to the Peace of Westphalia. And that's when the series of hellish episodes that began three decades before could finally be named. Later that very year, a German pamphlet appeared with the title
A Short Chronicle of the Thirty Years German War
.

But when it ended, the French were still in an ongoing war with Spain and on the verge of a civil revolt called the Fronde. The Dutch were still at war with the Portuguese. The Venetians were still at war with the Turks over Crete. The English were still at war with themselves, and on the way to beheading their king. The Swedes got most of what they wanted at the negotiating table, so one person who might be called a winner was twenty-one-year-old Queen Christina of Sweden. She was crowned at age six after the battlefield death of her father, Gustavus Adolphus, whose armies forced Kircher, Schott, and other Jesuits to run from Würzburg.