In the Loop

Leonardo drew knots. So did Albrecht Durer. Their ingenious intertwinings demand your full attention. Today few viewers bother. They're in too much of a rush.

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Old knots of many kinds are found all through the museums. The antique Persian rugs in the Textile Museum are intricately tied. So, too, are the snowshoes of wood and knotted thong in the National Museum of the American Indian. The Cone sisters of Baltimore, though better known for buying Picassos and Matisses, also brought together the 400-piece collection of Belgian, Parisian and old Venetian lace at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Knots intertwine in a 10th-century French Bible.(The Walters Art Museum)

There are complex interlacings in the medieval manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum. The example reproduced at left is from a Carolingian Bible from France, from the 10th century.

At the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, ornately knotted necklaces are draped around the necks of Chinese bodhisattvas. The Japanese tied knots shaped like turtles and like cranes. By how he tied his knots the tea master kept track of whether his containers were full of tea or empty. You can't rightly show a hanging scroll unless you have been taught how to tie the proper knots.

There's a great knot from the Renaissance in the National Gallery of Art. "The Sixth Knot" is a woodcut printed from a block that Durer cut in Venice or in Nuremberg 500 years ago.

Knots survive on bookshelves, too. The Library of Congress owns all 25 volumes of the series "Knots & Everything." The Inca of Peru used tied-together groups of colored knotted cords for recalling sacred numbers and calculating sums. Those seeking to decipher their knotted mathematics can consult the "Code of the Quipu" by Marcia and Robert Ascher (1981). Another kind of knot book, "The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie" by Thomas Fink and Yong Mao (1999), is available for those aiming to dress up.

Also on the shelves is the greatest knot book of them all, the one knotters call their bible, "The Ashley Book of Knots."

Published in 1944 and still in print, the "Ashley" is a marvel. Its thousands of line drawings are so clear in execution, so mentally demanding, so full of lore and learning and intricate ideas, you would have to say that they qualify as a major piece of early American conceptual art.

Clifford W. Ashley was born in 1881 in New Bedford, Mass., as in "Moby-Dick." Young Ashley served what he would call his "apprenticeship in knots" aboard the whaling bark Sunbeam, "probably the last merchant square-rigger to put to sea with hemp standing rigging." Then he turned to art. He went to school with N.C. Wyeth, studied with Howard Pyle and earned his living painting swashbuckling illustrations (he always got the rigging right) of hard men out at sea.

But then he got consumed by knots.

In the 619 pages of "The Ashley Book of Knots," each knot gets a paragraph, a number and a how-to drawing. Some specialists contend his book has duplications, but I have yet to find them. His black-and-white line drawings number 3,854.