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The Hunting of the Snark


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About my Snark hunt

About my Snark hunt
===== How I got into Snark hunting =====

In December 2008, I searched for “Hidden Faces” in the Wikipedia. I wanted to see whether an illustration by Henry Holiday (left) to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark was mentioned there. (Now it is.) But instead of that I found Gheeraert's Allegory of Iconoclasm (right, aka The Image Breakers) in the Wikipedia article on hidden faces. And then I saw a little rhombic pattern in the “mouths” of the “heads” depicted in both illustrations. The Snark hunt had begun.

left:
2009: Illustration by Henry Holiday to fit the eight in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark
(This is the 2007 version of an image in ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/carroll/lewis/snark/#fit8.)

center:
2008-12-16: Detail from "Hidden Faces" in en.wikipedia.org,
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hidden_faces&oldid=258354510

right:
Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, Allegory of Iconoclasm, c.1566–1568 etching 15” x 10.4”, British Museum, London.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gheerhaets_Allegory_iconoclasm.jpg
(In December 2008 the image was smaller: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/f/f5/20100214083045!Gheerhaets_Allegory_iconoclasm.jpg, but even there you can see the detail which cought my attention.)

Holiday and Gheeraerts I
(The blur is intentional. It removes unecessary details.)

Latest comments - All (13)
 Götz Kluge
Götz Kluge club
===== Dubious =====

Tree of Life
Here I probably went a bit too far. Holiday's depiction of a weed surely looks similar to Darwin's sketch of what later has been called "Tree of Life", but as far as I know, reproductions of Darwin's sketch were published in the 19th century earliest.

Nevertheless, I do believe, that Darwin's On the origin of species by means of natural selection (1859) and especially The descent of man and selection in relation to sex (1871) had an impact on Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (1876).
The Bellman and Charles Darwin
9 years ago. Edited 9 years ago.
 Götz Kluge
Götz Kluge club
===== Evidence =====

But there also is evidence for matches not being incidental:
The Broker's and the Monk's Nose (with a little help)
Similarities between the shapes can be incidental. But Henry Holiday also largely maintained the relation of these five shapes to each other. I call this "topological match".

There are several examples for such a match.
I put them in a special group:

9 years ago. Edited 9 years ago.
 Götz Kluge
Götz Kluge club
=== The Snark hunt didn't end yet ===
Grünewald and Holiday
9 years ago. Edited 9 years ago.
 Götz Kluge
Götz Kluge club
Latest finding:
The Vanishing & Thomas Cranmer's Burning
8 years ago.