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Dresden: Verlag von Woldemar Türk, 1861?68. Quarto (32.2 × 24.4 cm). 7 fascicles in a recent cloth binding with mounted original front wrapper; [1], VIII, 56, 22, [2]; [2] [57?136]; V, [137]?246, [2]; [6], [247]?284, [4]; [2], XII, [285]?348; [2], VIII, [349]?424, [2]; [2], VIII, [425]?518, [4] pp. With 100 plates, one of them colored. Some leaves heavily foxed; else very good. Complete collection of all published issues of the serialized work (complete copies are extraordinarily rare) by the Dresden Romanticist Johann Karl Bähr (1801?1869), best known today as a portraitist of Caspar David Friedrich. Remarkably, this extensive work deals with the pseudoscience of radiesthesia, or the supposed radiation of materials that affect the human organism and psyche. The tools of this discipline are, in addition to the divining rod, the sidereal pendulum used by Bähr, which is applied via circular diagrams, many of which are reproduced here. The influence of environmental factors on people is said to affect the movements of the pendulum, which should ultimately be interpretable via the diagrams. The plates chart the results effected by various chemicals, minerals, plants, foods, and even colors, intent on demonstrating regularities and systematizing the achieved results.Bähr, great-grandson of the architect of the Dresden Frauenkirche, George Bähr, studied at the Dresden Academy of Art from 1824. In the same year, Caspar David Friedrich took up his associate professorship in Dresden, although he was not appointed head of the landscape painting class. However, Bähr gained his practical experience in landscape painting far from the Dresden Romanticism in Jean-Victor Bertin's studio in Paris and finally on a trip to Rome together with Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, a later main representative of the Barbizon School. In the course of his life, he would return to Rome again and again, making the acquaintance of Bertel Thorvaldsen and, above all, the French history painter Horace Vernet. In addition to portrait painting, Bähr was particularly focused on history painting. He was guided by the classicist style of the Nazarenes and ultimately by the Düsseldorf School. From 1840, he himself taught as a professor at the Dresden Academy of Art. (Cf. Hans Joachim Neidhardt, in AKL VI, p. 235)However, Bähr was not only active as a history and portrait painter, but also dealt with a wide variety of subjects. Having grown up in Riga, one of his subjects was the tombs of the ancient Latvian people of the Livs. Just two years later, he published a collection of lectures on Dante's ?Divine Comedy? with regard to dealing with space and time. On one of his trips to Italy, Bähr stopped off in Weimar to exchange ideas with Goethe. One topic was probably the theory of color, which Bähr also dealt with in a later series of published lectures. Goethe's color theory was also incorporated into the present parascientific work on radiesthesia. Bähr attempts to use it for his own theory of the ?effect of colors on the mind and on a diseased nervous system.? In it, different moods and affects are assigned to the colors. The closer the color is to the light, the happier it makes the viewer, and the further away it would be from the light, the more serious and gloomy it makes the viewer. However, Bähr is of the opinion that the colors themselves create this effect and do not first follow the visual perception. He reports of people who were blindfolded and could perceive the color of a sheet of paper they were given. And a thermometer would also show higher temperatures with ?warmer? colors.As of May 2024, OCLC show only two copies (of which only one is complete) in North America. Seller Inventory # 54031
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