Artwork

The Manner of sailing by the power of Bellows practiced on that Planet

The Manner of sailing by the power of Bellows practiced on that Planet is a print by the Romanticist artist Filippo Morghen. It dates from 1769 and is held in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

About this work

Overview

Filippo Morghen’s series of ten etchings, produced in the late eighteenth century, presents a fanciful illustration of lunar society. The collection comprises a title page and nine detailed plates that portray imagined customs, technologies, and daily activities of moon inhabitants, reflecting contemporary fascination with speculative voyages beyond Earth.

Subject & Meaning

The images depict a surreal lunar economy, featuring transport by massive birds and sail‑boats driven by enormous bellows, fishing vessels fashioned from giant pumpkins, and hunting tools such as gigantic scissors used to capture oversized creatures like a rat the size of a cow. These motifs convey a playful critique of earthly exoticism and the era’s appetite for fantastical narratives.

Technique & Style

Executed in fine etching, Morghen’s work combines precise line work with intricate cross‑hatching to render texture and depth. The compositions draw on the decorative vocabularies of chinoiserie and turquerie, employing exaggerated, exotic details that were popular in European decorative arts, thereby merging scientific curiosity with ornamental fantasy.

History & Provenance

The series was created for an eighteenth‑century audience enthralled by speculative travel literature and early scientific speculation about the moon. Morghen, a noted Italian printmaker, circulated the plates among collectors of curiosities and printed them in limited editions, ensuring their presence in private cabinets of wonder across Europe.

Context

During the Enlightenment, imaginative depictions of lunar life coexisted with emerging astronomical knowledge. Artists and writers alike fashioned moon societies that mirrored and exaggerated contemporary cultural stereotypes of Asian, Ottoman, and Native American peoples, reflecting the period’s fascination with the exotic and the unknown.

Legacy

Morghen’s lunar etchings anticipate later visualizations of speculative science fiction, influencing subsequent generations of artists who explored otherworldly environments. The series remains a valuable example of how eighteenth‑century visual culture blended scientific curiosity with decorative exoticism to create enduring images of imagined worlds.