Artistic Magic in Miniature Form
The magician Ricky Jay, considered by many the greatest sleightof-hand artist alive, is also a scholar, a historian, a collector of curiosities. He has written about oddities like cannonball catchers, poker-playing pigs, performing fleas and people who tame bees. But probably his most enduring interest is a fellow polymath, an 18th- century German named Matthias Buchinger.
Buchinger (1674-1739) was a magician and musician, a dancer, champion bowler and trick-shot artist and, most famously, a calligrapher specializing in micrography — handwriting so small it’s barely legible to the naked eye. His signature effect was to render locks of hair that, when examined closely, spelled out entire Psalms or books from the Bible.
What made his feats even more remarkable is that Buchinger was born without hands or feet and was only 74 centimeters tall. Portraits show him standing on a cushion and wearing a sort of lampshade-like robe. Yet he married four times and had 14 children. Some people have suggested that he also had up to 70 mistresses, but Mr. Jay says that’s nonsense.
Mr. Jay, 67, has been studying Buchinger and collecting his work since he was in his 20s and has now written a book about him with the difficult title “Matthias Buchinger: ‘The Greatest German Living,’ by Ricky Jay, Whose Peregrinations in Search of the ‘Little Man of Nuremberg’ are Herein Revealed.” A selection of Buchinger work from his collection is also on display through April 11 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in an exhibition called “Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Drawings From the Collection of Ricky Jay.”
Mr. Jay said his i nterest in Buchinger began when he was a teenager and read about him in a history of magic. “It said he performed the cups and balls,” he said, referring to a classic magic trick in which balls seem to pass through the bottoms of cups and from one cup to another, “and I thought, how the hell could a guy without hands do that?” (It seems he used six cups instead of the usual three, but since Buchinger would have needed both his appendages to pick one up, Mr. Jay is not certain how he managed the necessary deception and misdirection.) Later he became even more fascinated by Buchinger’s artwork and, when he was in his 20s, bought his first piece: a tiny, index- card-size drawing incorporating the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. He now owns roughly 50 pieces by or relating to Buchinger.
His collection got a boost in the mid-’80s when he and Nicolas Barker, of the British Museum, split a lot of calligraphy material sold by Christie’s. “I took all the armless calligraphers,” he explained, “and Nicolas got the ones who had digits.”
There are few firsthand accounts of how Buchinger made his drawings, Mr. Jay said, but most suggest Buchinger balanced a quill between his foreshortened arms. There is a debate about whether or not he used a magnifying lens, though Mr. Jay is inclined to think not.
One of Mr. Jay’s favorite pieces is a portrait of Queen Anne of Britain, done in 1718. She’s shown in an oval surrounded by a curlicue design, incorporating some of Buchinger’s tiniest handwriting, that spells out three chapters from the Book of Kings. Her hair is a continuation of that text and on her bodice is a tiny image of St. George slaying the dragon.
“You keep seeing layer after layer here,” he said. “After years of looking, I realized that there is St. George and the dragon. This is probably his greatest stunt — the idea of concealing art within art. He was a smart guy. He had 14 kids to support.”