La Lecture du Grimoire [The piano with cats]

Etching, circa 1650/60, lacking signature and editorial indications.

Amusing and extremely rare print, which is characterized by its whimsical imagination. Depicts a magical concert inside a house. Attributed to Flemish artist Frans van den Wyngaerde (1614-1679), it is known through the title La Lecture du Grimoire or also The Piano with Cats, due to the presence of the mythical “cat” organ that Father Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) describes in the sixth book of his Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650).

The work, which is regarded as one of the most important representations of witch iconography, also occupies an important place in the history of music for its depiction of the cat piano, about whose real existence there is still no clarity.

From the point of view of witchcraft iconography “we observe a very rare print by François van den Wyngaert, entitled La Lecture du Grimoire, in which cats play a bizarre part, not without a good dose of cruelty. In the foreground various animals that have escaped the Sabbath chant incantations, reading one in a Grimoire and the other, in mockery, in a book of Gregorian chant. A horrible witch lying on a bed and with a raven on her head accompanies the chant but without a book; another woman crouched by the fireplace echoes her by reading on a scroll. In the center of the composition the sorcerer with a wooden leg plays a devilish instrument in the true sense of the word: it is a kind of harpsichord similar to one that a certain monk once presented to Louis XI, consisting of a case in which are enclosed eight cats of which emerge only the head and paws that serve as keys. The man, with a hilarious and malicious expression, pulls his paws to make the cats scream in a symphonic pattern. Behind the instrument, another man pulls the tails of the animals to draw different sounds from them: a horrible cacophony was to emerge from these manipulations, the demonic character of which is clarified by the owl perched on the back of the chair and a bat dangling upside down. This composition, which seems to be inspired by the most gruesome dementia, occupies an important place in witchcraft iconography: it remains as one of the most disconcerting testimonies to a spirit far removed from us and which fortunately future generations will not know” (cfr. Émile Grillot De Givry, Il tesoro delle scienze occulte).

Grimoires are a type of black book, a set of instructions for ceremonial magical rituals for dealing with demons, angels and other powers.  In folklore, a black book provides instructions for dealing with spirits, for divination, and for acquiring and using supernatural powers. In some cases, possession of the black book itself gives its owner supernatural powers, wealth or luck. Its magical powers were released by reading it backwards, from the end to the beginning. If someone did not read the book backwards, the devil would be able to take control of it. Many people and families kept the black books as guides for life; in fact, they included magical cures and healing recipes, prayers, spells, blessings, burial rituals, seasonal and agricultural rituals, divination techniques and ways to ward off evil and bad luck and attract good fortune. The material is a mixture of ancient folk customs and traditions and Christian elements. Some black books attribute their origins to Cyprian of Antioch (St. Cyprian), who lived in the fourth century AD in Turkey. According to tradition, Cyprian was a sorcerer who escaped the dominion of demons and the devil by making the sign of the cross; he converted to Christianity and became a bishop.

As for the musical aspect that characterizes this recording “Father Athanasius Kircher reports in Book VI of the Musurgia Universalis of an artist who invented, in order to dispel the melancholy of a prince who was beset by worries, a cat piano. Instead of strings, his instrument contained a number of cats’ tails inserted into narrow sheaths, beneath which there went up and down the hammers corresponding to keys, bearing on their extremities a sharp point. The cats are chosen by sex and age and arranged side by side in separate boxes according to the pitch of their voice. Under the agile fingers of the pianist, the points of the hammers artfully attacked the animals’ tails. These responded first with meows quick and sharp, but then, enraged by the frequency of the pricks, they changed, crescendo et rinforzando, into sounds that could enliven the most sullen spirit, and make even the mice break out in dance. The story of the cat piano (German Katzenklavier, French piano des chats) is surely one of the most strange and vexing affairs in the entire domain of speculative organology. The earliest images of the instrument date from around 1600, and purport to depict the (probably spurious) use of the cat piano in the witches’ Sabbath. Another tradition, indicated by the anecdote of Athanasius Kircher, suggests that the instrument was employed in the treatment of the mentally ill — making the cat piano an unlikely aid to what we would now call “music therapy.” Such a clinical use of the instrument appears as late as 1803, in a book entitled Rhapsodien über die Anwendung der Pyschischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrütungen (Rhapsodies on the Application of Psychological Methods of Cure to the Mentally Disturbed) by the German medical scientist Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813), who would later coin the term “psychiatry” (cf. La Nature, Vol. 11 (1883), pp. 319-320).

Frans van den Wyngaerde (8 July 1614 – 17 March 1679) was a Flemish printmaker, draughtsman and publisher. One of the leading print publishers in 17th-century Antwerp, he created and published multiple reproductive prints after Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck as well as foreign artists. Van den Wyngaerde was active as a reproductive artist as well as an original artist creating his own designs. Van den Wyngaerde's prints after his own original designs include etchings, engravings and plates in which both techniques are used.

As we said, the engraving is absolutely rare; it is missing from major museum collections. Likewise, it has rarely appeared on the antiquarian market, generically attributed to Kircher or an anonymous 17th-century German artist. An example, described as German School, was sold in the Bassenge auction in November 2020 for over 4,000 euros.

Magnificent proof, printed on contemporary laid paper, with margins, traces of paper fold visible on verso, otherwise in excellent condition.

Bibiografia

Aurore Gutierrez-Laffond, Théâtre et magie dans la littérature dramatique du XVIIe siècle (1998), p. 90; Donald Michael Kraig, The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy (2006) p. 38 entry “black book”); Émile Grillot De Givry, Il tesoro delle scienze occulte (2020) fig. 118; Bonnie Gordon, Voice Machines The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds (2023), p. 96, fig. 3.