Featured on PDR in the collection Visualising Bubbles (1500–1906)

We have entered the dog days of July in the Northern Hemisphere, with a heat wave bringing Europe to a rolling boil, and thoughts of sea, shade, or cooler climes to many people’s minds. Writing of a shadowed garden, Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (in Stephen Kessler’s translation) captures the lethargy of this weather and the pleasures of relief: how the summer atmosphere can feel “light, afloat; the world turning slowly, like a soap bubble, delicate, iridescent, unreal”. While soap froth has existed since at least the time of Mesopotamia, the fragility, iridescence, and impermanence that Cernuda describes started to bubble into the West’s visual imagination during the sixteenth century. Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky…