by Sabina Fiorenzi
Pierre Benoit’s Atlantis in the 1922 edition with René Kieffer’s binding
Atlantis, the lost continent, or rather, the lost paradise. Its traces lead very far back: Plato was the first in the West to mention this myth, placing that civilisation in a very remote past, even compared to Athens 2300 years ago. It can be said that, in the light of current geological knowledge, the catastrophic events to which Plato seems to refer when he alludes to the cataclysm that engulfed Atlantis can be placed around 10-11,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.
The two Platonic dialogues partly or completely devoted to Atlantis are the Timaeus and Critias. In the former, one of the protagonists, the old Critias, explains to the others – all Athenians – how the current geographical and political structure of the known lands came about. Pointing to Solon and the Egyptian priests as a source, Critias recounts how in a remote time a formidable power had attempted to conquer Europe and Asia. They were a people of advanced civilisation from Atlantis, a large island outside the Mediterranean Sea, which, by virtue of its geographical position in front of the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), acted as a bridge between the various continents, so to speak.
An insatiable desire for conquest had driven the rulers of Atlantis to attempt – after the colonisation of many areas of the Mediterranean – also that of Greece, and only the valour of the Athenians averted this event. Indeed, they not only strenuously defended their attacked territories, but also liberated the others already subjugated and drove the invaders back beyond the Pillars of Hercules. But the effort was in vain because in the suddenness of a day and a night the contending armies were swallowed up by a frightful earthquake and at the same time Atlantis sank forever into the ocean, settling into the depths of the abyss, which made navigation in that part of the sea forever impossible.
Atlantis as reconstructed by Athanasius Kircher
Let us follow Plato again, for Critias’ description of Atlantis continues in great detail in the dialogue named after him.
That happy island, in the partitioning of the world among the gods, was the destiny of Poseidon, who, by marrying the orphan Clitus, generated that royal dynasty of demigods from whose first-born Atlas, the island took its name. The sea-king himself immediately imprinted the land with that singular configuration of concentric rings, land-sea, which determined the inaccessibility of the royal palace on the acropolis.
Truly fortunate, Poseidon: it was a very fertile land, rich in water, forests, marvellous animals of the most varied species, and precious metals (including the famous and mysterious orichalc), and its 10 noble sons rivaled each other in magnificence and sumptuousness, building colossal constructions with sophisticated techniques. A powerful army and a sheltered and superbly equipped port guaranteed the inhabitants security and profitable trade. The rulers reigned in mutual justice and concord, everything seemed to proceed in the utmost harmony and peace until the behaviour of ungrateful men began to degenerate, to such an extent that Zeus gave hand to his thunderbolts and unleashed the cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis and its iniquitous inhabitants. So far Plato.
And from here began in the Western world all the investigations into the mythical continent swallowed up by the waves, which gave rise to the most varied hypotheses, Atlantis in the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, in the Caribbean, in the Sahara, once the bed of an immense lake, which burst into the channel separating the continents Africa and Atlantis due to violent earthquakes that destroyed its banks, permanently submerging the latter underneath.
And it is precisely this version of what happened that an old librarian offers to officer Saint-Avit and his colleague Morhange, who awakened – after being drugged and dragged there – in the royal palace of the lost Atlantis, in Benoit’s novel of the same name (1919). In that last hidden bastion of the vanished island, Antinea – whose name means new Antlantidean – reigns, a beautiful woman of perturbing charm, a descendant of Poseidon and Cleitus.
The queen feeds her own eternal youth with the lives of the men she makes fall in love with her; Saint-Avit, prey to that lethal charm, commits a heinous crime. Having regained possession of himself, he manages to escape: but the memory of Antinea, like the song of a desert siren, will give him no respite.
He will fatally decide to return to Atlantis and thus fulfil his destiny of love and death.
Antinea
The Casanatense owns a magnificently bound copy of this work from René Kieffer’s workshop in Paris, a 1922 edition illustrated with 24 original etchings by Lobel-Riche. The engravings – in perfect harmony with the novel’s fiery and visionary atmosphere – describe exotic characters and settings but above all convey the eternal feminine embodied by Antinea, a man-eating mantis, a true femme fatale, in all her shocking and morbid sensuality.
Femme fatale, indeed, Utopia. Whether it rejects man back into the painful memory of his original perfection, or propels him forward in the naive attempt of its reconquest, it loses him.
He has never completely removed the awareness of his own divine origins: having lost the sweet filial intimacy with the divinity, in the biblical Eden as in the island of Atlantis or in the mythical Atlan from which the Incas claim to be descended, has always constituted an inconsolable regret, a mourning without possibility of recomposition that Utopia nourishes.
And Utopia, be it Revolution, Religion, City of God or free sensuality – cruel and bloody – like Antinea often demands the price of life from those who crave it.
The only shield that man has to defend himself against her is paradoxically his own humanity: the consolidated imperfection honed in milllennials is the weapon that neutralises Utopia’s murderous dream.
And so also Atlantis, primeval universal paradise, cradle of civilisation and therefore utopian place par excellence, perishes because of man. Guilt and desire for pacification are perhaps the reasons why, having survived universal floods and devastating earthquakes at all latitudes of the earth, men have handed down its memory and still try to violate its secret buried in the depths of the abysses.
Would finding it again be like Ulysses landing in Ithaca or like E.T. returning to the sidereal spaces from whence he came?
Or rather, like the astronaut in the Space Odyssey, to penetrate the secret of the monolith and get lost in it for good?
Tying
Technical file by Iolanda Olivieri
René Kieffer ( Paris 1865 – 1964 ) Art binding in vermilion morocco mosaic on cartoons for P. Benoit, L’Atlantide, Paris, A. Michel, 1922
335 x 252 x 33 mm – [collocation 20. B. V. 93].
Front plate of the binding
Allusive Art Nouveau decoration with leather inlays and gold embossing. Equal front and back plates: black border with internally wavy ribbon and insertion at the corners of a triangular iron with wave motif in relief; in the centre of the field circular black ribbon from which six multicoloured Egyptian floral elements branch off, linking it to the border, and in which is inscribed the face of Queen Antinea wearing an Egyptian headdress on a multicoloured, gold-leaf background. Hinge with gilded dotted fillet and at each outer corner gilded iron with ivy leaf repeated four times to form a floral motif. Lip with embossed fillet. Smooth spine with mosaic floral elements repeating those on the plates; centre stamped in gold with author and title. Stitching on five nerves. Capitals in yellow, red and black silk. Pink silk markers in light and dark tones. Endpapers and related guard papers in sponged glue paper with floral/landscape effect in shades of red, silver and gold; three more guard papers follow, then the hardback editorial cover with its double guard papers; the original spine is preserved mounted on brackets after the back plate of the editorial cover. The bookbinder’s signature appears stamped in gold in the centre of the foot nail of the front plate: RENÈ KIEFFER; in the upper left-hand corner of the verso of the first front guard paper is a gilt label with borders, ramages and raised lettering in black: RENÈ KIEFFER / RELIURES D’ART / 18, RUE SEGUIER. PARIS.
ligature detail
The production of René Kieffer, one of the most significant French bookbinders of the early 20th century, can be illustratively divided into three periods. A pupil of the famous Ecole Estienne from 1889, the year of its foundation, he soon started working for the Chambolle – Duru bookbinding workshop where he acquired the techniques and traditional approach of the art and specialised in gilding (1st period). From the early years of the 20th century he was a disciple of Marius – Michel, who introduced the concept of bookbinding as an invitation to the book, the design having to allude to the content of the text, and who imposed the typical floral and phytomorphic fantasy of Art Nouveau, realised through gold embossing and leather mosaics.
However, Kieffer’s classical matrix continues to reveal itself through the balanced drawing contained within symmetrical frames, while his use of bright colors on which the characteristic vermilion red and peacock blue predominate (2nd period) is innovative. Between 1917 and 1923 he executed for the library of collector Jacques Doucet the modernist designs of Pierre Legrain, an exponent of the new Art Deco, illustrator and interior decorator, furniture and binding designer, embracing his revolutionary approaches: the abstraction of drawing through the use of geometric motifs, the titling used as a decorative element, and the introduction of unusual materials such as semi-precious stones, glass pastes, mother-of-pearl, metal foils, reptile skins and fish ( 3rd period).
However, these different styles of Kieffer often intersected, presumably also to meet the tastes of a clientele more or less tied to traditionalist canons; in fact, the binding under consideration, although dated 1922, is framed in the stylistic modules of the second period and is closely assimilated to some productions of 1902 – 1903, the year of the author’s debut at the Salon des Artistes Français.
The allusive image is inspired by Chapter XVII, there where the novel’s protagonist overwhelmedly describes the kingship of Antinea, who suddenly appears to him adorned like a superb, blazing idol: “The formidable luxury of the Pharaohs crushed her slender body. On her head was the headdress of gods and kings, huge and golden, on which emeralds, the national stones of the Tuaregs, traced and retraced her name in Typhinar characters….”
The editorial is an excerpt from Sabina Fiorenzi’s “Atlantis” fact sheet published in the catalog of the Exhibition Utopia, the Dream of a More Beautiful Life held at the Library in 2003.
Read more:
Utopia, the dream of a more beautiful life. Rome, Casanatense Library, 2003