Robert Fludd Pictured Nothing as a Black Square in 1617

Nearly three centuries before Kazimir Malevich made the black square an emblem of modern abstraction, the English physician and occult philosopher Robert Fludd filled most of a printed page with darkness. His 1617 image does not depict an object, landscape, or figure. It tries to picture what existed before a universe was available to picture.

The uneven black field appears on page 26 of the first volume of Utriusque Cosmi, Fludd's encyclopedic account of the macrocosm and microcosm. Written around all four edges is the Latin phrase Et sic in infinitum: "And so on to infinity." The border describes a space that the rectangle itself cannot contain.

A diagram at the limit of representation

Fludd called this primordial condition hyle, a state of unformed matter or potential before creation. The image belongs to a sequence in which darkness is gradually organized by divine light into circles, elements, planets, and the ordered cosmos. Its square shape is partly practical—the image was made for a rectangular printed page—but Fludd uses that physical boundary to point toward something supposedly without one.

This is why the image can look startlingly contemporary while doing a very different job from a modern monochrome. It was not presented as an autonomous artwork or a rejection of representation. It was an explanatory image in a theological and cosmological argument, one that represents nothingness by showing an almost total absence of visible information.

Black before Black Square

Fludd's page now invites comparison with Malevich's Black Square, first exhibited in 1915, and with the black mourning page in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy from the eighteenth century. The formal resemblance is immediate, but the meanings arrive through different systems: cosmology for Fludd, narrative interruption for Sterne, and the proposed "zero" of painting for Malevich.

In the Public Domain Review essay “Black on Black”, Eugene Thacker follows that recurring use of black as both something seen and a refusal of sight. Fludd's image is especially durable because it exposes the paradox so plainly. The page gives nothingness a texture, a frame, and a caption, making absence into a remarkably material printed object.

An illustrated theory of everything

Fludd was born in 1574 and trained as a physician, but his published work ranged across medicine, music, optics, astrology, mechanics, memory, and Christian Hermetic philosophy. Utriusque Cosmi, published in Oppenheim beginning in 1617, attempted to map correspondences between the greater world of the cosmos and the lesser world of the human body.

The complete volumes survive in collections including the Wellcome Collection. Read the short source post at Boing Boing, then explore Fludd's image in greater depth through the Public Domain Review.