Category: Education

Henry VIII’s kitchens at Hampton Court Palace

Education, Multimedia, Renaissance

Another slow news Sunday here, but I did find an addictive little YouTube channel run by Historic Royal Palaces, the British independent charity which cares for the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace. The videos in the channel cover the history of those sites and their royal inhabitants.

First one’s free about Henry VIII’s enormous kitchens at Hampton Court Palace. At 36,000 square feet, the Hampton Court kitchens are the largest surviving Renaissance kitchens in Europe.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/iwr68gROYM0&w=430]

Once you’ve gotten your fill of that, there are a bunch more about the food history of the Tudor court: Lighting a Tudor fire without matches, What the cooks wore and why, Turning the spit, Show and tell with spices, and King’s Confectionary.

Still that’s just scratching the surface. There are a dozen more videos about Henry VIII, his politics, his culture, his lovahs. Scroll down the list on the right of the uploads page to feed your Tudor addiction or to commune with the Tower of London ravens or find out about royal toilets through the ages

GA Museum publishes all medieval Italian art in North America

Books, Education, Medieval

Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The SouthThe Georgia Museum of Art has published the first part of a massive compendium of all the Italian paintings made between 1250 and 1500 on canvas and wood found in North American collections.

Part one is titled Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South. Author Perri Lee Williams of Miami University covers 400 paintings from public collections in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Puerto Rico. It’s a whopping 801 pages long and divided into 3 volumes.

From the press release (pdf file):

The “Corpus” compiles paintings by such illustrious artists as Giovanni Bellini, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna and Giotto as well as works by lesser-known names. Up-to-date scholarship, including provenance, iconography and bibliography, appears opposite each illustration in an easily accessible format. This resource is particularly valuable to scholars, educators and curators of early Italian art who are unable to travel between institutions.

Professor Bruce Cole of Indiana University and the late Professor Andrew Ladis of the University of Georgia initiated this project in 1993. At that time, only two publications might have rivaled a project as ambitious as this new fully illustrated “Corpus”: Richard Offner’s multi-volume “A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting” (College of Fine Arts, New York University, 1930) and Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri’s single-volume “Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Collections” (Harvard University Press, 1972). However, both of these publications are now out of date and limited in scope. The new publication covers works by artists from all regions in Italy and is likely to become a seminal compendium of early Italian art.

It costs $200 which sounds like a lot, I know, but if I had it to spend I totally would because this is an enormous, even unprecedented, work of scholarship and worth every penny. Museums and libraries are eligible for a discount, so if you represent such an institution call (706) 542-0450.

World history in 100 objects starts tomorrow

Ancient, Education, Medieval, Modern(ish), Multimedia, Museums

Mark your calendars, folks. The first episode of BBC’s Radio Four and the British Museum A History of the World in 100 Objects debuts tomorrow. That’s already today for those of you across the Atlantic.

The theme of the first 5 episodes is “Making Us Human” and they covers objects that define us as human, made between 2,000,000 and 8,000 B.C. Tomorrow’s inagural object is the Mummy of Hornedjitef.

This is the mummy of Hornedjitef an Egyptian priest who was buried in a coffin, within a second, outer coffin. Examining his body using CAT scans and X-rays revealed that he suffered from arthritis and osteoporosis suggesting he was a mature man when he died. The embalmers have placed four packages inside his torso, probably his lungs, liver, stomach and intestines. He lived over a thousand years after Tutankhamun and Ramesses the Great at a time when Egypt was ruled by Greek kings.

There’s tons of information on the brand spanking new website on each of the 99 objects that have already been selected for broadcast. For those of us out of Radio Four’s range, the programs will be posted as podcasts.

The website also has a neat feature where individuals upload objects of their own and explain their significance. Just get a good quality digital picture and click the yellow Add Your Own Object icon in the upper right of the page. A moderator will check to be sure it’s not pr0n then approve it.

You can view all the images in the series plus the ones uploaded by individuals and find out more about them using this Flash map. Click on Contributor in the menu on the left and choose Individuals to see only the pictures uploaded by people.

The radio program is just 15 minutes a day, but I’ve already spent hours browsing the site. It’s addictive.

The Mummy of Hornedjitef

The history of the world in 100 objects

Ancient, Education, Medieval, Modern(ish), Multimedia, Museums

Beginning in January 2010, BBC’s Radio Four in conjunction with the British Museum will air 100 15-minute episodes each detailing the history of one object from the British Museum collection. The aim is to cover a vast stretch of history from 1.4 million years ago to modern times, and all over the globe, not just European history.

[Radio 4 controller, Mark] Damazer said each episode would feature a description of the object but most of it would focus on “areas where radio excels as a medium – on how the object was made, its political, economic and cultural significance, how the object came to be in the collection, and so on. I have heard those that have been made so far and they are wonderful.”

[British Museum director Neil ] MacGregor said he would look at each object in roughly chronological order, “spinning the globe so we can see what’s going on in the world at various moments”.

Each week will be focused around a particular theme, such as “after the Ice Age” and “meeting the gods”, with contributors including Bob Geldof, Wole Soyinka, Grayson Perry, Madhur Jaffrey and Seamus Heaney.

Some of the artifacts covered are a 1.4 million year-old hand axe from the Olduvai Gorge, a Chinese Zhou ritual bowl from 1000 B.C., the Croesus Coin (550 B.C.0 from what is today Turkey, thought the be the first modern form of currency, a bust of Roman Emperor Augustus (27-25 B.C.) and the Nef Galleon, a beautiful mechanical toy ship from 1500AD.

This project has been in the works for 3 years. It took MacGregor and a team of curators 2 years just to pick 99 artifacts from the 8 million pieces in the British Museum collection. The last object has yet to be chosen. They’ll wait until later next year to select it since it might not even exist yet.

There will be a companion website which is set to go live in January (it’s just a placeholder now). More information about all of the artifacts will be on the site, as will listeners’ submissions.

For those of us across the pond, every episode will be available on the site in podcast format. In an unprecedented move for the BBC, the podcasts will remain online for 2 years, so no need to rush over to the site to make sure you don’t miss one.

OMG ArchaeoBus!1

Ancient, Education, Modern(ish), Multimedia

You know, like a bookmobile only with archaeologists inside of librarians and artifacts instead of books!1 How completely awesome is that?

It actually used to be a bookmobile for the Athens Regional Library System that traveled to rural parts of Northeast Georgia, but budget cuts had long since left it parked and forlorn.

As a member of the Society for Georgia Archaeology, archaeologist Thomas Gresham had long wanted to put together a roving archeology show.

When he joined the library board and the subject of what to do with ye olde bookmobile came up, he proposed they sell it to the SGA for a mobile museum. Nine hundred bucks changed hands and the deal was done.

That was two years ago, and now the ArchaeoBus is primed and ready to travel to libraries and schools in Clarke County, Georgia, showing all comers artifacts excavated locally and giving mini-instructionals and labs on archaeological processes.

So far they’ve only done one planned stop, but Rita Elliot, the archaeologist who drove it to Athens from the mechanic in Savannah where the bus was first repaired and fitted with display cases, has big plans to integrate the bus into students’ curricula.

Elliot and other volunteers want to apply about a dozen activities and presentations to students’ in-class curriculum.

Archaeologists might ask younger kids to offer theories about where an artifact like a coin or a dish came from and then explain their guesses.

Older kids might have to show how they can use the Pythagorean theorem to map out a field excavation site using string on a peg board, Elliot said.

Using the theorem, archaeologists can lay out an accurate rectangular grid system to mark the layer of the soil where artifact is found.

“You want it so that you can see the clues in the soil, and unfortunately, the only way to do that is math, so the Pythagorean theorem comes in handy time after time,” Elliot said.

How many times do teachers hear the “But how am I going to use this in the real world?” refrain. The ArchaeoBus will answer that question as well as a million others about the history of the state and the study of material remains in general.

I am so into that I could not be more into it.