When were family-tree diagrams invented? Mind's Eye discovers the progenitor of today's graphic timelines and trees in an ancient three-meter chart of history. Hidden in plain sight, this Roman masterpiece has never been honored at book length before.
The Great Stemma was not only a vast visual abstraction of the march of time from Creation as far as the birth of Jesus Christ, but also marked a swerve in civilization towards exploiting our visual perception as an extra tool for thinking.
Mind's Eye can be read rapidly, by skimming the 117 illustrations and checking out the QR links. Or it can be savored as an 88,000-word narrative in which historian Piggin narrates how he brought this neglected graphic to light.
Medieval Latin copies convey only imperfectly the brilliance of the lost original, which represented the colorful characters of the Tanakh as if they were competing pieces on a game-board. Its ageless design led on to a 16th-century craze for genealogy, a bold remake by artists in China and the graphic principles which we use today to interpret events and stories visually.
Other books by Jean-Baptiste Piggin
Jean-Baptiste Piggin started digging up the untold early history of diagrams a decade ago. Both the origin of the Great Stemma – the topic of Mind's Eye – and brand-new evidence about the making of the Peutinger Table, a late antique chart of the Roman world, rank as his major discoveries. Born in New Zealand where he graduated from the University of Auckland Law School, he is married with three adult sons. After a 40-year career in international journalism, including periods in London, Wellington, Paris, Berlin and other cities, he lives in Germany. As a service to scholarship his unofficial weekly newsletter reports on accessions to the Vatican Library’s vast digital manuscripts portal. He founded and curates a virtual Library of Latin Diagrams and a sensuous garden of flowering shrubs. Follow his newest discoveries on Twitter at @JBPiggin
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