Dario Robleto

The First Time, The Heart

The First Time, The Heart (First Pulse, Flatline) is a special print edition that is part of a larger project by Dario Robleto titled, The First Time, The Heart: A Portrait of Life, 1854-1913, a set of 50 prints housed in a clamshell portfolio box, also published by Island Press.

To honor the original method of recording the human heart beat used by 19th century physiologists—mark making in soot—Robleto, working with Island Press, devised a novel printing method merging lithography with hand-flamed and sooted paper. A high-resolution scan was taken of the original, historic pulse lines, which were printed lithographically in transparent ink. The paper was then hand-flamed, depositing an atmospheric layer of soot over the image area. After the paper was briefly submerged in a bath of shellac and denatured alcohol to fix the soot to the paper, lithotine (a purified, petroleum-based solvent) was applied to the printed lines and text with a brush to gently lift the image from the soot ground, revealing the white lines.

Artist Dario Robleto applying flame to the paper

Dario Robleto doing a demonstration to students with a pencil on a narrow sheet of black paper

Students drawing each others' heartbeats.

Artist Dario Robleto at the medical library examining a small book with black bars and faint white lines through them

Rectangular sooted prints laid out across the tables for drying

Prints with rectangular black squares in the middle of them laid out across the tables for drying

Dario Robleto uses a candle taper to apply a layer of soot to the paper.

Early in Dario’s residency, he led a group of students in an experimentation drawing onto sooted paper with a single hair brush, reminiscent of the way that the earliest heartbeat recordings were made.

Students practice listening to each others’ pulses and drawing their heartbeats onto sooted paper.

Dario conducted additional research at the Bernard Becker Medical Library at Washington University during his Island Press residency.

Dario uses a lithography fan to dry the prints after the soot has been fused to the paper.

The sooted prints are laid out for drying.

Sonja Petermann, Island Press summer intern, photographs the prints laid out for drying as intern Danqi Cai and artist Dario Robleto look on. In the background, intern William Nussbaum is assisting master printer Tom Reed with the lithography printing of the heartbeat images.

PROOF publication brochure with essay by Dario Robleto

The human quest to represent our bodily form is ancient. From the earliest known cave drawings tracing the curva- ture of a hand, the masterworks of the human figure by Leonardo di Vinci, even modern medical imaging that maps the terrain of our brains at the level of the neuron, humans have yearned to understand themselves and others through marks and images. Perhaps this deep rooted desire found its most essential form through the invention of an image we often take for granted, and which for the first time in history gave us visual access to the living heart: the pulse wave.

But to visualize this fundamental movement of life is to suggest the possibility of visualizing its opposite: the stillness of death. As revolutionary as it was to invent a new image of life through a simple rhythmic curve, that same curve, stretched long and taut, has produced no less an iconic image of our existence: the flatline.

But where are the first pulse wave and flatline ever recorded? Whose hearts were the first to offer their form, their remnants of a lived, emotionally complex life embedded in the oscillations of a wavy line? What technology needed to be invented to record the long-thought inaccessible heart?

Like the earliest tracing of a hand on an ancient cave wall, these milestones in the history of images should be remembered, honored and empathized with in their ability to universally convey something essential about us over long stretches of time. The diptych of prints, The First Time, the Heart (First Pulse, Flatline), created by Robleto with Island Press, brings together the first successful scientific attempts to mark these poles of life (1853 and 1870, respectively), which changed the way we understand ourselves and communicate our bodies.

Although still very crude, with both the pulse wave and flatline images physicians now had an indirect window into the heart’s behavior, which would revolutionize the scientific study of health and disease. But these lines were not only medical, they were also philosophical in the long arc of human self-reflection. Humans are beautifully creative in the ways we hope meaning—essences—are literally in the lines, images or objects we create to hold them. The first pulse wave and flatline should be remembered as part of that history.

[PROOF essay by Dario Robleto about this project and the diptych The First Time, the Heart (First Pulse, Flatline), specifically. Download brochure with essay by clicking the link to the left.]

A black box with the text 'THE FIRST TIME,THE HEART A PORTRAIT OF LIFE 1854-1913 BY DARIO ROBLETO' in silver text. A silver squiggly line accents the box.

Inside view of a book box spread. On the left a small smoky book is inlaid into the box and on the left 'THE FIRST TIME,THE HEART A PORTRAIT OF LIFE 1854-1913 BY DARIO ROBLETO' and under it we see a list of the contents

Scan of a print. A smoky sooty black rectangular in the middle with white squiggly lines across etching into the soot. Below a text etched out of the soot reads 'Being shamed/scolded (You behave like a child; you ruin everything for me) 1876

Editions from this project

Image of a black portfolio box of 50 photolithographic prints. The images on the individual prints are gray and smokey with cardiogram-like lines

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