Ricky Jay’s ‘Matthias Buchinger’
By Teller
June 1, 2016
MATTHIAS BUCHINGER
“The Greatest German Living”
By Ricky Jay
Illustrated. 150 pp. Siglio. $39.95.
In Ricky Jay’s sumptuous, scholarly, witty new book, “Matthias Buchinger: ‘The Greatest German Living,’ ” the author introduces his protagonist as “a 29-inch-tall phocomelic overachiever.” After a quick trip to the Oxford English Dictionary (“phocomelic” = lacking the long bones of the arms or legs < Greek, “seal-limbed”), we second that understatement.
Matthias Buchinger Engraving by Elias Beck; Image from collection of Ricky Jay
Matthias Buchinger (1674-1739) had no legs or feet, and only partial arms that terminated without hands, and yet he was internationally celebrated for his dexterity. He did magic tricks with cups and balls. He manipulated dice and cards. He loaded and fired guns. He played the flute, bagpipes, dulcimer and trumpet. He bowled trick shots with a skittle ball through a maze of candles and wineglasses. He donned Highland dress and danced a hornpipe on his leather-clad stumps.
As a fine artist, Buchinger constructed figures of wood and deftly arranged them in scenes inside narrow-mouthed bottles. His intricate pen-and-ink drawings show off his specialty: crisp quill calligraphy, so minuscule as to send the viewer running for a magnifying glass — all hand-lettered by a man who had no hands.
When we learn that stocky little Buchinger also outlived three wives and fathered 14 children, we see why Jay, known for his fascination with uncommon entertainers, would pursue Buchinger’s history with a devotion bordering on obsession.
Ricky Jay is a magician, historian, writer and actor who perches on the border between tweedy and pop. He has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and opened for Cheech and Chong. His theater work, often in collaboration with David Mamet, features Jay’s sleight of hand, his passion for showbiz history and a lascivious joy in the polysyllabic mot juste — the last nicely on show in this book.
When Jay was a teenager, he read about Buchinger in a book by the illusionist and magic historian Milbourne Christopher, charmingly depicted here as a staid Brahmin with a soft spot for the ardent student. In 1982 Christopher sold Jay his first Buchinger drawing. It is only the size of a postcard, but depicts an epic scene: the tablets of the Ten Commandments high on an altar, flanked by columns, and crowned with an arch sculpted with angels and ornaments. Study the picture under magnification and it grows more astonishing: What appeared to the naked eye to be a floating sphere is actually the full text of the Lord’s Prayer crammed into a spiral half the size of a dime. A chalice less than an inch tall is sculpted from the words of the Apostles’ Creed. The drawing is baroque grandeur in microminiature — like a Bach cantata sung by gnats.
For extra pizazz, Buchinger generally signed his work upside down and mirror-reversed, and added “born without hands or feet.” And — to the historian’s delight — he often included a date, a location and a personalization to his patron. So the artwork itself leaves a trail (filled in by other evidence) that lets Jay piece together the story of Buchinger’s life.
When Buchinger was a child, his parents “concealed him as much as possible,” but around the age of 20 he — or someone uncannily like him — began to show up as a fairground attraction performing “artistic acts with his stumps” in Leipzig, Strasbourg and Basel. His first surviving drawing dates from 1705, when he would have been 31. As his reputation grew, he was patronized by the public, the titled and even royalty. There is a 1717 entry in the French royal account book listing Buchinger’s pay for amusing 7-year-old King Louis XV at the Palace of the Tuileries. He did calligraphy and magic with cups and balls — a royal kiddie show.
In an age when half of humanity never left their hometowns, Buchinger’s career took him from Germany to Denmark, Holland, France, England and Ireland. He was newsworthy enough to have ballads and poems written about him and to inspire errors in the newspapers (he was reported dead 17 years before his actual passing).
His private life remains largely unknown, except an episode with his fourth wife, who, according to James Paris du Plessis, a former servant of Samuel Pepys, beat him so cruelly that “he flew at her with such force that he threw her down and getting upon her belly and Brest and did so beat her with his stumps that he almost killed her, threatening to beat her in the same manner if she ever did so any more — and she became after a very dutiful and loving wife.”
Jay cites a present-day performer who gives us some sense of how Buchinger might have worked as a magician. The 26-year-old Canadian Mahdi Gilbert is limbed much as Buchinger and does exquisite card magic using techniques of his own invention that baffle even other magicians.
But the mystery of Buchinger’s calligraphy still invites speculation. According to firsthand reports, Buchinger cut his quills and held his pen with the help of growths and calluses on his stumps. Jay finds traces of sketches and pinpricks where Buchinger most likely used tools to help him lay out the design. But what about the minuscule lettering? Did Buchinger devise machinery to assist him in writing, as he did with musical instruments? No historical observer mentions seeing him use such a thing — not even a magnifying glass — but Buchinger, as a showman and magician, may have kept his methods under wraps. David Hockney is confident Buchinger used a lens. Jay, however, cites some remarkable historical examples of micrography done with the naked eye. One theory even holds that Buchinger might have found a sweet spot between the length of his arms and myopia.
Published to accompany Jay’s recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Matthias Buchinger” is illustrated primarily from Jay’s opulent collection. Bound into the book, for example, is a reproduction of a piece of “window” art, in which Buchinger cut tiny apple-shaped openings in his drawing of a family tree to reveal names perfectly placed on the page beneath.
The text is as much about Jay’s adventures as a collector as it is a biography of Buchinger. We join Jay on his 21-year quest to find a Buchinger self-portrait — the “holy grail” of Buchinger art — with the full text of seven psalms worked into his wig. Jay tells tales of devious book dealers, befuddled English aristocrats, suspicions of forgery, and treasures sold like contraband in New York hotel rooms and from the trunks of cars. Such tales speak sweetly to those of us who would rather own a Houdini grocery list than a Malibu beach house.
Ricky Jay’s learned prose sparkles with humor and passion. And it’s easy to see why Jay fell so hard for Matthias Buchinger. That little man was a dynamo, a mystery, a real-world superhero — though we’re not likely to see him in a Hollywood blockbuster. Comic book superheroes have sex appeal, but very little sex. In comparison, the portly, legless Buchinger was demonstrably a stud.
Teller is the shorter, quieter half of Penn & Teller and co-stars on the CW network’s “Penn & Teller: Fool Us.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 5, 2016, Page 35 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Small Wonder.
Read the original New York Times article here: www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/books/review/ricky-jays-matthias-buchinger.html
