Zvyky, obřady a slavnosti u různých národů světa – Huptych Miroslav (2024)

Monumental and bizarre, both pictorial and educational, this book by the extraordinary artist Miroslav Huptych features hundreds of period illustrations, over a thousand standard pages of records, descriptions, and testimonies, but mainly more than fifty double-page author collages. Following the project Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart (awarded the Magnesia Litera for Publishing Achievement of the Year), here is another ambitious project with no less artistic and even greater content value. After illustrating J. A. Comenius's book Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart, which was awarded the Magnesia Litera for Publishing Achievement of the Year (published by Práh, 2019), Miroslav Huptych presents another remarkable work. Thanks to his lifelong passion for archiving period engravings, as well as notes and interesting facts from readings, he has compiled nearly a thousand standard pages of testimonies, more or less credible, about the customs of various nations around the world. This is not an ethnographic selection, but rather an incredibly diverse mosaic of quotations that also speaks about the observers themselves. It testifies not only to ancient customs, magic, and archetypal wisdom, but often also to unprecedented cruelty and oppression by the powerful. Given the current state of the world, it can be said that the selection of quotations exposes the dark sides of human behavior and shows what they are based on...