Illustrating and Animating Renaissance Nonsense

In an earlier post, I gave some excerpts from a nonsense love poem from 400 years ago that has survived in a manuscript in a library in Paris. Dom Hills has illustrated and animated two of the nonsensical images from this poem, which you can see here:

 

This 3D concertina print, known as a Polyorama Panoptique, takes us through a key-hole to show us an anvil looking askance at a hammer, as well as a dozen elephants in a plum stone. Such strange and impossible images that are so characteristic of nonsense oblige the reader to do a mental double-take, perfectly illustrated here by a 3D print that also obliges us to shift perspective, steadily revealing new nonsense, much as the poem does.