Category: Modern(ish)

Oil sketch dismissed as bad copy is by Rembrandt

Modern(ish), Museums

An oil sketch in the Museum Bredius in The Hague discounted as a copy has been revealed to be an autograph work by Rembrandt. The Raising of the Cross, once widely accepted as a real Rembrandt, had been dismissed as a bad copy for 50 years until art historian and former museum curator Jeroen Giltaij began to investigate it for a book he was writing on Rembrandt’s oeuvre. He thought the quality of painting marked it as a work by the master. Museum Bredius conservators cleaned and restored the work, removing discolored varnish layers and later overpainting to reveal the painting in its “naked” unretouched state. Rembrandt’s distinctive brushstrokes are now clearly visible.

Infrared reflectography (IRR) and X-ray scans of the sketch performed by Rotterdam-based art restorer Johanneke Verhave reveal that its composition initially matched that of the Munich version. During the painting process of the sketch, the composition changed to move the horseman from left of the cross facing the viewer to the bottom right corner with the horseman looking up at the cross, his and his horse’s backs to the viewer. The horseman took the place of a dog that was in the original design. An almost identical rider appears in a 1629 etching by Rembrandt.

From the first half of the 19th century, the work was believed to be an authentic painting by Rembrandt. At the time, art historians thought it was a study for Rembrandt’s 1633 The Raising of the Cross , a piece almost double the size of the sketch that is now in the Alte Pinakothek museum in Munich. When the oil sketch was acquired by collector and museum founder/director Abraham Bredius in 1921, he had no doubt that it was painted by the master’s hand, but he thought it was made around 1640, a new and improved version of the Munich piece rather than a preparatory sketch for it.

The attribution to Rembrandt was cast into doubt by scholars in the 1960s and by the end of the decade it had been removed from the artist’s catalogue raisonné and downgraded in status to, as art historian Horst Gerson described it in 1969, a “crude imitation, vaguely based on Rembrandt” made by a nameless follower.

Well the joke’s on Horst, because it is neither crude nor an imitation. Experts from the Rijksmuseum have also performed a technical study of the painting and they too concluded it is an autograph work by Rembrandt. Dendrochronological analysis of the wood panel it was painted on dates the felling of the tree to 1634. The plank had to be seasoned before use, so it was probably painted between 1642 and 1645. It could not have been a preparatory sketch for The Raising of the Cross Rembrandt painted in 1633.

The re-authenticated Rembrandt is now on display at the Museum Bredius in a short exhibition dedicated to the oil sketch and the research that restored it to its birthright.

Artemisia’s Allegory to be digitally uncensored

Modern(ish), Museums

A nude by Artemisia Gentileschi that was censored with extraneous draping is being restored in public at the Casa Buonarroti museum in Florence. The painting of a young woman holding a basin of water containing a compass with a small bright star above her head is the Allegory of Inclination (ie, natural talent for art). When she was painted in 1616, Inclination was nude, but 65 years later a draped cloth was painted over her lap for “modesty.” It is now fully ensconced in the painting’s history and will not be removed, but conservators will use the latest imaging techniques to digitally remove the drapery and reveal Artemisia’s original vision.

Casa Buonarroti was bought by the great Renaissance master Michelangelo in 1508. It was not his primary residence, but he lived there for some time when he was in Florence. He let his nephew Leonardo move in around 1540. He lived there, later with his wife and children, until his death in 1599. Leonardo’s third son was born in that house in 1568, four years after Michelangelo’s death. He was dubbed Michelangelo the Younger after his illustrious great-uncle.

After his father’s death, the Younger undertook extensive renovations on the old family home, enlarging it and hiring the premier artists of the time to adorn it. For the home’s long gallery, he had the coffers in the ceiling painted with different scenes from the life and artistry of Michelangelo the Elder. Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the artists chosen. She was making a splash on the artistic scene in Florence, and Michelangelo the Younger played a big role in that. He was a personal friend of the family, and had in fact happened to be visiting Rome when Artemisia was born and was present for her birth. He considered her a great talent and like a daughter to him. He helped launch her career in Florence after she left Rome, introducing her to high-powered, deep-pocketed members of Florence’s art-buying elite, commissioning work and promoting her talent at the Medici court. For the Allegory, he payed her more than three times what he paid the other artists who painted the coffers in the gallery.

Michelangelo the Younger’s nephew Lionardo inherited the family home. In the early 1680s, he commissioned the artist Baldassarre Franceschini, aka Volterrano, to drape a lap blanket and a veil over Artemisia’s Allegory. Lionardo was concerned about that the naked lady on the ceiling was indecorous for in his home where his wife and “a crowd of young boys” lived. That deed was done with the painting in situ, so the Allegory has not been removed from the ceiling since its creation until now.

Restorers took the painting down and installed it in one of the museum’s halls where it will be studied and conserved in public view from October 2022 to April 2023. Every Friday, conservators at work will answer questions from the public. A companion exhibition at Casa Buonarroti will run from September 2023 to January 2024.

“Through working photographs, diagnostic imaging and analysis, we will be able to determine the exact technique Artemisia used, correctly map the work’s condition, and monitor our treatment plan for the painting,” says US Florence-based conservator Elizabeth Wicks, who heads the project’s state-of-the art team comprising expert technicians and restoration scientists, under the supervision of Casa Buonarroti Director Alessandro Cecchi and Jennifer Celani, official for the Archaeological Superintendence for the Fine Arts and Landscape for the metropolitan city of Florence. “Due to the historic nature of the repaints, it is not possible to remove them from the surface, but the scope of our diagnostics will facilitate the creation of a virtual image of the original that lies beneath the surface of the painting, as we see it today,” Wicks explains. “Next week, we start our virtual journey ‘beneath the veil’ under diffuse and raking light sources, followed by UV and infrared research. Hypercolormetric Multispectral Imaging and examination by digital microscope will then help us learn as much as possible about the condition of the original painting technique and the later repaints. X-ray and high-resolution reflectography and other analytical techniques will follow.”

Gold coin hoard dispersed at auction

Modern(ish), Treasures

The Ellerby Hoard, the collection of more than 260 gold coins dating to between 1610 and 1727 that was discovered under the floorboards of a North Yorkshire couple’s kitchen, has been sold. As planned, each coin was put up for auction individually. The final total including fees was £754,000, more than triple the pre-sale estimate of £200,000-£250,000.

The highest hammer price was for the rarest coin: a 1720 George I guinea with a minting error that gives it two reverse sides instead of an obverse with a bust of the king and the reverse of four royal shields. The Reverse Brockage Guinea sold for £52,000. Another coin rarified by an error at the mint — a guinea with Charles II’s Latin name CAROLVS misspelled as CRAOLVS — sold for £8,000.

(Or was it an error? It may have been petty revenge, which makes it even cooler. So blatant a mistake would usually show signs of attempted correction, but instead the misplaced R is soundly double-punched. The coin was made in 1675, and mint employees would have had good reason to be disgruntled at that time. The crown had fallen so deeply into debt under Charles II that in 1672 he declared the Great Stop of the Exchequer, meaning the state simply stopped paying its debts. It was supposed to last a year. It lasted until March of 1675. The Great Stop caused mayhem in finance and banking, and a die-sinker at the mint must have felt the pinch as much as the gold merchants.

Anyway nobody else seemed to take much issue with the typo. There are only four examples of this coin ever to appear at auction, and all of them are in heavily circulated grades. The error wasn’t even noticed, not publicly at any rate, until a pair of them were exhibited at the Numismatic Society in 1867.)

So the sellers are happy, I guess, and dozens of buyers around the world are happy, but one of the largest hoards of 18th century English coins ever discovered is now dispersed. Still no word on what became of the earthenware cup they were hidden in for those just-shy-of-300 years.

Remains of 240 people found under defunct department store

Medieval, Modern(ish)

The remains of more than 240 individuals buried in the cemetery of a lost 13th century friary have been discovered under a former department store in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales. More than 100 of them are children, and most of them infants under the age of four. The bodies were unearthed at the site of the onetime Ocky Whites department store, closed since 2013 and now slated for redevelopment. The large number of graves identifies the site as the burial ground of the friary of St. Saviours.

The first record of the Dominican friary of St. Saviours in Haverfordwest dates to 1246 when Henry III granted the friars 10 marks to build a church. Ten years later, they were granted another 15 marks to move their community to a new site where they built a larger friary. St. Saviors received frequent donations and bequests over the centuries, but as happened with many monastic communities, by the early 16th century its revenues were slipping. It turned to leasing out its lands in 1526, and in 1535 took in tenants.

The friary met its final end in the second round of dissolutions of the monasteries. More modest friaries like St. Saviors hadn’t been targeted in the forced visitations, confiscations and formal dissolutions that demolished monasticism in England and Wales. By 1538, the focus was on getting the remaining communities to voluntarily (?) surrender their houses to the Crown. The eight remaining friars at St. Saviors did so on September 2nd, 1538, although the last signatory seems to have changed his mind because the name is smeared off the document.

St. Saviours disappeared from the landscape, leaving its traces only on names like Friars Lane and the Friars Vault pub. There were no historic records noting its exact location and the knowledge was lost over time. The discovery of the burial ground has begun to unravel the mystery.

Site supervisor Andrew Shobbrook, from Dyfed Archaeological Trust, described the priory as a significant complex of buildings with dormitories, scriptoriums – rooms devoted to writing and manuscripts – stables and a hospital.

“It’s quite a prestigious place to be buried. You have a range of people, from the wealthy to general townsfolk,” he said. It is believed that the graveyard could have been used until the early 18th Century. […]

Some of the remains have been found with head injuries, consistent with having been in battle, and the wounds could have been caused by arrows or musket balls, according to Mr Shobbrook.

One theory is that the victims could date from an attack led by Owain Glyndŵr, who was the last native Welsh person to hold the title Prince of Wales. It was a joint assault by Welsh and French forces, who had united to battle English occupation of Wales.

“We know that the town was besieged in 1405 by Owain Glyndŵr and they could be victims of that conflict,” said Mr Shobbrook.

The skeletal remains are being cleaned and analyzed before reburial in consecrated ground near the find site.

Did acne bacteria in the heart kill Kosciuszko?

Modern(ish)

A study of the vessel containing the heart of Thaddeus Kosciuszko, engineer, hero of the American Revolutionary War and leader of the 1794 Polish uprising against Russia that bears his name, has found evidence that he may have died when a common skin bacterium infected his heart.

The experts said last month they found the genome of the Cutibacterium acne in the wax, wood and linen that had long-term contact with the tissues of Kosciuszko’s heart, which has been preserved. They said it could have led to endocarditis, or inflammation inside the heart, and to his death, aged 71, in Switzerland.

Born in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1746 to a noble family, Kosciuszko left for Paris in 1768 when civil war, family conflict and political infighting kept him from receiving a commission. In Paris he embraced Enlightenment humanism and learned architecture while expanding his military knowledge. He joined the American colonists’ fight against Britain in 1776, and received a commission from the Continental Congress as a colonel in the engineers.

The United States benefited from his brilliance as a military architect for seven years. He returned to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1784, and finally received his longed-for commission as a major general in 1789. He wouldn’t even have to wait three years to get the opportunity to become a hero fighting for his own country. Kosciuszko’s success on the field, most famously in the Battle of Dubienka (1792) when he defeated 25,000 Russians with just 5,300 soldiers, made him a national hero. It wasn’t enough for King Stanisław August Poniatowski, however, who capitulated to Russia anyway and ordered the army to stand down. Kosciuszko resigned his commission and tried his own hand at revolt against Russia. The Kosciuszko Uprising was not successful and Thaddeus was captured. His stint as a Russian prisoner of war ended in 1796 with the death of Catherine the Great and the ascension of Tsar Paul I.

Kosciuszko lived something of a peripatetic existence after that, traveling in the United States and Europe, advocating with Napoleon, who he saw clearly as a dictator who had sounded the death knell of the French Revolution, for a democratic Polish state. He died in 1817 in Solothurn, Switzerland after having fallen from a horse into a cold stream and developed a fever.

As with another Polish hero, Frederic Chopin, Kosciuszko’s heart was preserved separately from his other organs and body. His embalmed body was initially interred in the crypt of the Solothurn church before it was transferred to the Wawel Cathedral to keep company with kings and other national heroes. His heart was kept in an urn at the Polish Museum in Rapperswil, Switzerland, for 110 years until it was repatriated to Poland. It is now in Warsaw’s Royal Castle.

The team was led by Prof. Michał Witt, head of the human genetics institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan and Dr. Tadeusz Dobosz of the Wroclaw Medical University. They took the samples for their molecular tests from a vessel where the heart is being kept, at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

Under some conditions, skin bacteria can attack the internal organs, including the heart, leading to very serious problems, Witt told Polish Radio Zet24.

He stressed that it’s hard to say for sure what caused Kosciuszko’s death but that their findings have led them to the “rationally based hypothesis” that it was the acne bacteria that caused the documented rapid deterioration of his health and death.