Eighteenth century woodworker's clothing and equipment, shown as part of the Hellbrunn Mechanical Theatre in Salzburg, Austria

The Hellbrun Mechanical Theatre is a huge automaton. It was built between 1748 and 1752 and is housed in the Hellbrun palace in Salzburg. The machine was built by a salt miner called Lorenz Rosenegger and was commissioned by Archbishop Andreas Jakob Graf Dietrichstein. 

I came across this animated sculpture while watching a fascinating BBC programme called 'Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams' which was written and presented by Professor Simon Schaffer. That's him standing in front of the mechanical theatre in the image above. All of the images of the Mechanical Theatre used in this post are screen shots saved from this documentary.

The theatre shows a scene of different trades and professions busily working, watched by the governing elite whose figures move relatively little.

Apart from the incredible skill of Rosenegger in carving the 200-odd figures used in the machine and animating most of them with a water-powered system of mechanisms (together with a water-powered musical organ to cover the sound of the workings in action), I was also struck by the glimpse that the theatre gives into the clothing and tools used by the woodworking trades of the time.

The woodcarver has his workpiece held on a kind of rotating spit-like frame. Chris Pye notes that this type of device is still in common use in some places, such as Southern Germany. I've seen it on illustrations of medieval woodcarvers at work centuries before the Hellbrun machine was constructed. Many contemporary carvers prefer to work on larger pieces with the carving held vertically instead of horizontally, so that it is orientated the same way that it will eventually be displayed.

This frame for holding work is in the studio of Jón Adolf Steinólfsson in Rekjavik, Iceland

This frame is in Joachim Seitfudem's studio. Jo is based in Bristol but trained in Bavaria. 

The sawyers at work. All of the tradesmen are shown wearing aprons and many have coloured lederhosen-style braces across their chests. I wonder if the colours of their hats or braces mark them as members of different craft guilds, or if they are just random?

The turner is at work on a pole lathe (which I imagine would be powered by a springy frame rather than a pole, as it is indoors). His tools are hung on the wall behind him. 

The timber framers build a roof. Two workers wear caps, the others are dressed very similarly to each other with black hats. Journeyman carpenters from this region wear their brimmed black hats as one of the signs of their status even today. Are the two workers lower down the roof journeymen, or do these figures represent different trades altogether?

The cooper works with drawknife and shavehorse to make barrels and buckets. As with the pole lathe shown above, modern green woodworkers use equipment that has basically changed very little from that shown by Rosenegger. This pole lathe and shave horse (made by Tom Redfern) were in use when teaching these skills at the Green Gathering a few years ago.

Schaffer also notes that there is another, darker side to the Hellbrun mechanical theatre. The salt miners were 'radicals and insurrectionists' and Rosenegger had an armed guard to keep him at his work. The machine was not just an entertaining snapshot of life at the time. To its intended audience of wealthy aristocrats, it gave a view of workers behaving themselves in an 'ideal society'.

Teaching woodcarving with a knife at my studio in Bristol, together with some thoughts about whittling

Yesterday, Jack came to my studio to learn how to carve with a knife.  We had a great day and he wasn't the only one learning new things. He told me about a very interesting video of a talk by Denis Dutton, part of which concerns prehistoric stone tools that were possibly made solely to show the maker's skill; very interesting to a craftsperson!

Jack sent me an email afterwards saying how much he had enjoyed the day and learning a new skill. It also made me think about whittling as carving. Some carvers can be dismissive of whittling with a knife, thinking that it is an 'inferior' kind of carving. This teaching session was a strong reminder of just how daft that view is in my opinion. 

The knife is one of the most versatile tools for a carver. It was clear from watching Jack's progress that the knife work taught many lessons in working with wood that are transferable to using all other edged carving tools: working with the grain, the importance of the slicing cut, sharp blades being vital etc. These points are fundamental to a carver, they certainly aren't trivial things to learn.

The use of a single carving tool to make a complete sculpture is also a good carving exercise. My friend Jo Seitfudem told me once about his father, a master carver in Bavaria, giving him a single gouge and telling him to carve an entire sculpture with it. Without a range of tools to use, the importance of working with the timber itself to achieve a finished piece is much clearer to a novice carver.

A look at the work produced in regions that regularly use knives as a basic carving tool (Africa, Papua New Guinea) also easily illustrates that carving snobbery about their use is just narrow-mindedness.

Here's a photo of the walnut pendant that Jack carved during the session, We agreed that it looks great and it seemed to capture just what he was aiming for, with the tooled finish and the delicately carved spiral that he achieved:

It's interesting how the process of teaching a skill can so often lead to the teacher learning and seeing their speciality with fresh eyes too!

Ancient Egyptian wood carving and stone carving tools

Whilst looking around the museum in Bristol, I saw these ancient carving tools on display and thought it might be nice to share them with you.

The tools were bought by the museum in 1919 from a Captain E.A. Mackay. The metal is a copper alloy, which makes the carving achievements of those ancient craftsmen seem all the more amazing as the copper alloy is softer than the steel used in modern tools. Other elements used in ancient copper alloys included antimony and arsenic. Arsenic often occurs naturally in copper ore, so may have been the original alloying material with copper to make bronze. Eventually it was superseded by the use of tin, as tin was easier to add in specific amounts and was non-toxic . It wasn't until the time of the last pharaohs, long after these objects were used, that Egyptians began to use iron for this purpose.

The chisel with a wooden handle seems very similar in size and shape to a modern palm chisel and was probably used for detailed work without a mallet. It is thought to date to between 3,300 and 3,600 years ago, what was the eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom. The awl in front of it (a spike used for making small holes) is thought to date to the same period.

The larger chisel in the holder to the right would have been used with a mallet. It is believed to be older, from the twelfth dynasty of the Middle Kingdom about 3,800 to 4,000 years ago.

Ancient Egyptian images of woodworkers show them using many tools that woodworkers into the medieval ages of Europe were still using variations of. Axes and saws were used to roughly shape the wood into planks and blocks, adzes shaped it further, awls and bow drills were used to make holes and chisels and mallets were used for fine work. Much of the timber used was probably imported from what is now eastern Africa and the Lebanon, as Egypt did not have large forests at that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maler_der_Grabkammer_der_Bildhauer_Nebamun_und_Ipuki_004.jpg

Nearby, there are examples of stone carving tools. The mallets certainly look familiar; I have a couple very like them in my own studio! The caption on the display speculates that the worn one may have been buried with a carver in the belief that, although it was worn out in this world, it would be perfect again in the next. They are thought to date to the third dynasty of the Old Kingdom, between 4,620 and 4,700 years ago according to the museum caption.

The stones on the shelf would be used for grinding down stone sculptures to smooth them. The copper alloy chisel in front of them dates to the eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom, between 3,300 and 3,600 years ago. It would have been used to shape stone, with a more rounded, bar-like shape of chisel used afterwards to smooth the sculpture. 

The British Museum Collection

There are more tools on display at the British Museum in London. The information used here comes from the labels with each exhibit.

King Djer reigned during the First Dynasty, about 5,100 to 4,900 years ago. His tomb is surrounded by the remains of over 300 people; his wives, guards and servants. They must have committed suicide or been killed at the time of the king's entombment, to serve him in the afterlife. One retainer was called 'Hem', meaning simply 'servant'. He was a craftsman and was interred with two copper chisels, a copper adze head and the tool on the right, which is thought to have been used to cut leather. The copper axe head on the left was one of several found with other bodies. It was a high-status possession and these people were probably special guards. This axe head is inscribed, including with an elephant design, but no one knows what the inscription means.

King Khasekhemwy ruled during the Second Dynasty, about 4,904 to 4,700 years ago. He was keen on construction and developments in such things as large-scale use of dressed stone during his reign led the way for the later building of the Pyramids. 194 thin copper models of tools were found underneath a collapsed wall in his tomb. They include models of chisels, harpoons, adzes and needles. Many are in  groups of eight, possibly reflecting the Egyptian working week of eight days according to the label. I wonder why they are models and not genuine tools?

The New Kingdom dated from about 3,564 to 3,084 years ago. Below is shown a wooden mallet from this time, found at Thebes. See the similarities between the shape of this one and the much older ones shown in the Bristol Museum display above. The bow-drill found at Deir el-Bahri exhibited next to it uses bronze bits to drill holes. The end of the wooden bit holder would be steadied inside a hollow cut into the conical wooden piece displayed behind the drill. The bow would then be moved back-and-forth to spin the drill bit.

The tools shown next come from different periods. The chisel with its wooden handle dates, like the saw immediately below it, to the New Kingdom in Thebes. They use bronze blades, like the pull-saw at the bottom which came from Deir el-Bahri and dates to the 18th Dynasty about 3,600 to 3,300 years ago.

The two bronze-bladed adzes also date to the 18th Dynasty. The one on the left is from Thebes during the reign of Tuthmosis III which was about 3,493 to 3,439 years ago. The one on the right was found at Deir el-Bahri and was used during Hatshepsut's reign 3,493 to 3,471 years ago. This adze still has the original leather thongs holding the blade on. Its wooden handle is carved with a hieroglyphic inscription. Compare these tools to the image of the workers using an adze and a saw shown above.

A label near these tools also shows some commonly-used ancient Egyptian woodworking joints:

These damaged corners from coffins show how joints would also be strengthened using dowels or cramps, made from a close-grained wood such as sidder. 

The sidder wood cramp top right in the photo above dates to the 17th or early 18th Dynasty, 3,600 to 3,500 years ago. It is inscribed with the name 'Ameny'; maybe the name of the cramp's maker or its user, in a similar way that modern workers in busy workshops or building sites write their names on their tools to stop them 'going for a walk'. The coffin boards on the left comes from Asyut during the 12th Dynasty, about 3,950 years ago. They have been joined with such cramps. The dowelled joint on the right is from the same location and period as the cramp-joined boards and has some dowels from the Middle Kingdom (4025-3,630 years ago) displayed below it.

What timbers did ancient Egyptians use? 

It can be hard to tell from the names that they gave them, but scientists have analysed woods under the microscope and worked out what many of them are from their cellular structures. They are generally associated with things made for funerals, as these have been preserved in tombs.

The main local timbers used were sycomore fig (Ficus sycomorus), tamarisk (Tamarix sp.) and Nile acacia.  To make coffins and the like, carpenters would need longer, straighter boards and these were obtained by trade, mainly with the Levant. Coniferous softwoods such as cedar as well as juniper and cypress were bought and used. Cedar was especially reserved for the coffins of high-ranking people, although different parts of a coffin could use different timbers, depending on their suitability for different purposes. You can find out more, including some ancient Egyptian names for different timbers, at the digitalegypt website.

There are some more images of ancient Egyptian woodworking tools on this post by Marijn, of the St Thomas Guild: follow this link. There is also an illustrated history of the development of the saw online here.

A Personal Favourite

Finally, I had to include my favourite piece of ancient Egyptian woodcarving. It is a statue of a priest who would have said prayers for the dead. His name was Ka'aper. 

He lived during the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Dating this period seems quite difficult, but it is somewhere between 4,686 and 4,520 years ago. The people who excavated the carving, at Saqqara, thought that the statue looked like the chief of their village so they called it 'Sheikh el-Balad' which means 'village chief'.

The statue is 112 cm (about 3' 8") tall and is carved from sycamore wood (I'm assuming that this refers to sycomore fig (F. sycomorus)). The eyes were made to look 'alive' by using a copper lining with white quartz and a central disc of rock crystal.

http://www.ibcousinie.info/Egypte%202010/Mes%20Photos/01le%20Caire/Le%20Musee/Ka_aper.jpg

People in other parts of the world use similar optical tricks on their carved statues. For example, in New Zealand traditional Maori woodcarvings have inlaid paua (abalone) shell eyes that twinkle in firelight to look like they are watching.

Photograph copyright James Shook from Wikimedia Commons