Stauss, Thomas Magic Metamorphosis

The Secrets of a Rare Italian Picture Album Revealed

The historical roots of picture transformation books can be traced back almost 500 years to the early 16th century. They are extremely rare and belong to the rarest and most bizarre book objects known today. Only four hand-painted copies from before 1750 can be found in libraries and private collections worldwide. This may be why they have been largely ignored by book and manuscript researchers and have hardly been the subject of adequate scientific investigation. The publication "Magic Metamorphosis. The Secrets of a Rare Italian Picture Album Revealed aims to fill this gap. A transformation book is a kind of trick book" with repeating sequences of images that enable an optical illusion or the performance of an astonishing magic trick. For this purpose, a finger register with several tabs (or indentations) that is barely visible from a distance is attached to the front of the book block. Each of these tabs correlates with a specific image motif. When leafing through the transformation book, the performer can use his thumb to select one of the tabs and thus show the audience a desired image motif or make it disappear again. Since several pages are unpainted, the transformation book can also be presented as seemingly unprinted a magical effect. Where were transformation books performed in historical times? In historical times, this feat was performed as part of a magic show in all social circles: at festive occasions in royal and princely houses, at soirées (evening parties) so popular in aristocratic circles, at fairs, markets, in taverns, or on the street. What is the cultural and historical significance of transformation books? Their significance within cultural history is repeatedly attested to by numerous mentions in historical sources: the Indian Emperor Jahangir (1569-1627) enthusiastically reports in his memoirs about the performance of this feat at his court. The well-known German writer and Baroque poet Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen (1622-1676) also made the transformation book the subject of his narrative three times in his novel Der Seltzame Springinsfeld and described it in all its facets over eleven pages. Even in mathematical and physical literaturee.g., in the works of the two famous polymaths Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) and Caspar Schott (1608-1666)the transformation book found its way in as a mechanical curiosity. Today, transformation books are also available for children as an educational toy, so to speak, to practice presentation and public speaking skills. What prompted the research into transformation books? The impetus for this research was a globally unique picture album made in Italy around 1650, which Thomas Stauss discovered in Paris in the late 1990s and although this picture album lacked an index was able to clearly identify as a picture transformation book. Thanks to fortunate circumstances, the author finally succeeded in acquiring this rare object for his collection in 2018 and has been researching it intensively ever since. Of particular importance for the analysis of this album was and is its historical connection to the history of Swiss natural history research. The painter used the famous work Historia animalium by the Zurich naturalist and city physician Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) as a model for the depiction of the land animals, fish, and birds in the picture album. Nearly 40 percent of all illustrations in the album are taken from Gessner's work, which laid the foundations for modern zoology as we know it today.