Category: Modern(ish)

Update: stolen Darwin notebooks returned in hot pink gift bag

Looting, Modern(ish)

Two of Charles Darwin’s notebooks stolen decades ago from the Cambridge University Library, have been returned anonymously, left on the floor outside the Librarian’s office in a hot pink gift bag. Inside the gift bag was the blue archive box custom-made to contain the notebooks. Both notebooks were inside the box, snugly wrapped together in plastic wrap. Also inside the bag was a brown envelope with the printed note:

Librarian

Happy Easter

X

The two notebooks have been carefully examined and are in excellent condition, thankfully. There are no missing or damaged pages.  

The notebooks were last seen in the fall of 2000 when they were removed from Cambridge’s Special Collections Strong Rooms to be photographed in high-resolution for the library’s digital collection. If they were returned, there’s no record of it and a routine check in January of 2001 discovered that the notebooks and the custom blue box that contained them were not back in their previous location. Despite the inestimable historical value of the notebooks, one of which contains the Darwin’s 1837 Tree of Life drawing which has become an iconic image in the history of science, this did not immediately trigger a massive search. The Darwin archives in the Cambridge University Library are enormous, by far the largest collection of Darwiniana in the world, so the staff figured they’d just been misplaced and would be found sooner or later.

Limited searches over the years turned up nothing, and in 2020 the library launched a comprehensive targeted search of the archives and storerooms. That process was expected to take years, but in the interim, the university officially reported the missing patrimony as theft to local and international authorities and launched a public appeal for the recovery of the missing notebooks.

The appeal made the news around the world, and obviously it worked because somebody’s small conscience grew three sizes that day and the notebooks are back where they belong. This time they should stay put, at least if Cambridge University Librarian Dr. Jessica Gardner has anything to say about it:

“The building has transformed significantly since the notebooks were first reported as missing. In the last 20 years this has included completion of new high security strong rooms, new specialist reading rooms and a range of additional security measures.

These include CCTV, card-and-pin access to secure areas, a dedicated Security Team onsite and further root-and-branch reviews of all our security protocols to come – to make sure we minimise any future risk as far as humanly possible.”

Police are continuing to investigate the theft and now the return of the notebooks. The prodigal notebooks will go on public display this summer in Darwin in Conversation, a Cambridge University Library exhibition dedicated to Darwin’s extensive correspondence of 15,000 letters written over a lifetime.

Visit Henry III’s toilet at restored Clifford’s Tower

Medieval, Modern(ish)

Clifford’s Tower in York is the only structure remaining from York Castle. The original structure on the site was a timber Norman motte-and-bailey castle built by William the Conqueror in 1068. The wooden keep was burned down in 1190 in a horrific anti-Semitic riot where the 150 members of York’s Jewish community had barricaded themselves inside the tower from the wrath of the mob. Under violent attack from knights, a siege engine and the rioters, the Jews inside the keep killed themselves and set fire to the tower. The few who opted out of suicide and managed to escape the tower were massacred by the mob.

The present Clifford’s Tower was constructed on the ashes of this tragedy. Reconstruction began in the early 13th century, but the new stone keep would not be completed until the end of the century. York Castle would mainly be used for administrative purposes — prison, mint, briefly as headquarters of the Exchequer — not as an actual royal residence. It was not well-maintained. Accounts from the 15th century already report some of the buildings were in ruins, and there was a scandal in the 1590s around the gaoler of the castle purportedly trying to demolish the tower to sell the stone.

Clifford’s Tower saw real action in the English Civil War. Queen Henrietta Maria had it restored and a new wood roof put on in 1643 just in time for it to be taken by Parliamentarian forces in 1644. After the Restoration, the tower was garrisoned by troops who were notorious carousers. On April 23, 1684, they fired a ceremonial salute indoors and set the place on fire again. The fire gutted the wooden interiors and Henrietta Maria’s roof and the tower fell to ruin. Occasionally people used it as a stable or barn.

Finally it became property of the state in the 1915 and it was repaired and stabilized in the 1930s so it could be opened to the public for the first time in centuries. It was sort of a look-in attraction, however, a 15-minute visit at most to walk up the stone circular staircase to see some great views of York, including the Minster. There was no signage to speak of, limited information panels, and nothing to do inside but look up at the sky.

Now English Heritage has invested £5 million in a total transformation of the tower’s interior. Timber stairs and hanging walkways criss-cross up the tower walls, giving visitors access to long-hidden spaces like Henry III’s garderobe, ie, his toilet. It was a high-tech bathroom in the 13th century, complete with a built-in toiletries cupboard, a flushing spout that ran water down the lavatory hole all the way down and out the tower. Visitors who Escher their way up the walkways will reach the new roof deck with spectacular views of the city.

The new interior and roof deck at Clifford’s Tower has been designed by Hugh Broughton Architects, a leading contemporary architectural practice. Supported by four slender wooden columns, the ingenious structure sits on a raft foundation, which spreads the load without impacting on the archaeological remains beneath the tower. The practice has worked closely with conservation specialists Martin Ashley Architects to produce a scheme which sits respectfully within the heritage structure.

New interpretation will help place the tower in the context of both the historic York Castle and the city of York itself as well as introducing visitors to the tower’s long and turbulent history. Visitors can explore the castle’s founding by William the Conqueror, the tower’s role as the site of the tragic 1190 massacre and suicide of York’s Jewish community – one of the worst anti-Semitic episodes in English history – and the role of the castle as both a medieval royal stronghold and a garrison during the Civil War.

Integral to the new scheme is its soundscape. Layers of background sound will take visitors back in time, allowing them to experience the tower as it would have been at various periods in its long history. Visitors can engage with five key moments in that history with the help of the voices of local residents who bring the stories of fictional characters to life, each representing a different chapter in the tower’s past.

Clifford’s Tower reopens Saturday, April 2nd. Here’s some cool drone footage of the new roof deck:

Versailles restores Royal Tennis Court as Museum of the Revolution

Modern(ish), Museums

The Tennis Court Oath was one of the pivotal moments of the French Revolution. The day was June 20, 1789. The deputies of newly-formed National Assembly, a little too heavy on the Third Estate, too light on the Clergy and Nobility and way too keen to make France a constitutional monarchy for King Louis XVI’s taste, arrived at the meeting place of the Estates General only to find the doors barred and the premises occupied by troops. So they regrouped a few streets over inside the Royal Tennis Court Louis XIV had built a hundred years earlier to play the “jeu de paume,” a precursor to tennis, on the recommendation of his physician.

Deputy Jean Joseph Mounier proposed that in response to this insult to their rights, the nation’s representatives take a solemn oath in defense of the public good and national interest. The proposal was received with thunderous applause and the Assembly quickly drew up a decree:

The National Assembly, considering that it has been called to establish the constitution of the realm, to bring about the regeneration of public order, and to maintain the true principles of monarchy; nothing may prevent it from continuing its deliberations in any place it is forced to establish itself; and, finally, the National Assembly exists wherever its members are gathered.

Decrees that all members of this assembly immediately take a solemn oath never to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the realm is established and fixed upon solid foundations; and that said oath having been sworn, all members and each one individually confirm this unwavering resolution with his signature.

The deputies then each “signed” by swearing:

We swear never to separate ourselves from the National Assembly, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the realm is drawn up and fixed upon solid foundations.

This was the first direct confrontation between the revolutionaries and the king. They were still on board with a monarchy, but only as bound by the will of the people. By this oath they declared to Louis XVI that the National Assembly was in service of the public and national good, not the king.

A year after the momentous event, oath-taker Edmond Dubois-Crancé asked his friend painter Jacques-Louis David to commemorate the anniversary with a monumental painting that would put the Tennis Court Oath on the same plane as David’s famed historical works like 1784’s The Oath of the Horatii. David exhibited a preparatory pen-and-ink drawing of his planned painting in 1791, hoping to sell engravings of the drawing via national subscription to raise the 72,000 pounds he needed to complete a painting 33 feet long.

Unfortunately for David, the France of 1791 was very different from that of 1789. Constitutional monarchists were very much not in favor anymore and many of the 1789 heroes were either fired, disgraced or, well, dead, by 1791. The subscription model failed because the public had no interest in celebrating the event. David never finishing the painting and kept it in his workshop until his death in 1825. The unfinished work was cut up into three pieces by his heirs. The largest portion was sold to the state and is now on display in the Chimay attic at Versailles.

The Tennis Court itself became property of the state in 1793 and was closed to the public in 1798. It was used for random purposes — storage, workshop, painter’s studio — for a while and listed as a national historic monument in 1848. Come the Second Empire, the Royal Tennis Court was neglected, its associations no longer appreciated by the powers that be.

The idea of celebrating the Tennis Court Oath came back into favor a century later under the French Third Republic which embraced its revolutionary antecedents. In 1880, July 14th, Bastille Day, was declared the French National Celebration, and the government began to plan for a museum of the Revolution. In 1882, the old Royal Tennis Court, abandoned for decades by that point, was chosen as the spot for the new museum.

It was refurbished by the architect of the Palace of Versailles, Edmond Guillaume. The French government also commissioned a new artist, Luc-Olivier Merson, to make a painting of the Oath based on David’s drawing and unfinished canvas. Ninety-four years to the day after the deputies of the National Assembling took the Tennis Court Oath, the new Museum of the Revolution opened in the Royal Tennis Court complete with a statue and portrait busts of the most important signatories. Above the busts is a band painted on the walls containing the names of all signatories. Beneath the band the walls were painted in rich Pompeian red.

This new vision of the Royal Tennis Court also faded quickly. After the centenary of the oath in 1889, the court was just maintained but not handled with the care it required. There was even talk in the 1930s of converting it into a ping pong room for Senate functionaries who worked at Versailles.

Last year, Versailles undertook a comprehensive restoration program to return the Tennis Court to its 1883 condition when it was reborn as the Museum of the Revolution. Over eight months of work, restorers were able to restore the black cement floor, the Pompeian red wall paint, the names and laurel wreaths and decorative borders on the band, and Merson’s monumental painting.

The room is reopening on Friday after eight months of work, giving the public “a forgotten part of our history,” Catherine Pegard, president of the palace’s public administration, told AFP.

It is dominated by a monumental canvas, also restored, which was based on the famous unfinished work by Jacques-Louis David depicting the signing of the oath.

Largest starfish offering found at Templo Mayor

Modern(ish)

Archaeologists have discovered an elaborate Mexica offering containing 164 starfish at the Templo Mayor in Mexico City. This is the largest number of starfish ever found in a ritual context. One of them is uniquely well-preserved, a magnificent specimen of Nidorellia armata, commonly known as the chocolate chip star, 22 cm (8.7 inches) wide with all of its internal structures still intact.

Offering number 178 was discovered late last year in the circular building known as the Cuauhxicalco, described in 16th century accounts as the place where the rulers of Tenochtitlan were cremated. It is the largest ritual offering ever discovered in the Templo Mayor precinct, combining symbolic elements of earth and water, like the remains of a female jaguar armed with an atlatl (spear-thrower) and large numbers of marine organisms including coral, puffer fish, snail shells and the aforementioned starfish.

Stratigraphy places the offering in the sixth stage of construction, dating it to around 1500, the end of the reign of great military leader Ahuitzotl and the beginning of the reign of his successor Moctezuma Xocoyotzin. This was the last hurrah of the Aztec Empire before the arrival of the Spanish.

During the government of Ahuízotl, the Mexicas established trade routes, along with their military expansion in various parts of Mesoamerica, hence the presence in Tenochtitlan of corals brought from the Gulf of Mexico, starfish from the Pacific Ocean, and a female jaguar that could have been brought from distant regions such as Soconusco, a territory located between what is now Chiapas and Guatemala.

Based on historical sources, such as the Matrícula de Tributos , and previous findings, PTM archaeologists are clear that the offering is related to war, not only because of the atlatl that the jaguar carried in a claw, but because of its location in the Cuauhxicalco, building aligned with the southern side of the Templo Mayor, consecrated to Huitzilopochtli, god of war.

Báez Pérez explains that in their worldview, the Mexica related starfish and jaguars with the night sky and the night, this feline being an image associated with the god Tezcatlipoca, in his nocturnal representation.

“A good part of the Mesoamerican peoples believed that the origin of the world was linked to the sea, therefore, marine organisms were treated as relics. In the case of the Mexicas, their military power allowed them to bring thousands of marine objects and recreate an entire aquatic environment in Tenochtitlan itself.”

The offering is so complex and dense that archaeologists are still recovering all of its elements, fragment by fragment, so they can be analyzed in laboratory conditions. The final count of starfish may well rise even higher. Archaeologists believe perfectly-preserved starfish was placed in the offering pit first on a layer of fiber. The weight of the jaguar and copious other offerings then pressed the fellow into the fiber and kept the organic matter from decomposing as it did for the other 163 starfish. It is still in situ while the team determines how best to remove it en bloc to ensure both it and the sediment on which it was found come out together.

Garden ornament is lost Canova masterpiece

Modern(ish)

A statue of the Recumbent Magdalene made by Neoclassical sculptor par excellence Antonio Canova has been rediscovered 100 years after it was sold off and its illustrious creator forgotten. It will be going under the hammer at Christie’s in London in July with a pre-sale estimate of £5,000,000-8,000,000 ($6,580,000-10,530,000).

Recumbent Magdalene was celebrated as a masterpiece in its time. When this sculpture was commissioned by Prime Minister Lord Liverpool, Canova had been the most famous sculptor in Europe for three decades, creating works for popes and aristocrats, depicting Napoleon nude as Mars (the Emperor rejected it on the grounds that it was “too athletic”) and Napoleon’s sister Paulina nude as Venus (Canova had planned for her to be depicted as Diana the Virgin Huntress; she insisted on posing nude as Venus). Napoleon as fig-leafed, muscular Mars, btw, was bought by the British government in 1816 and gifted to the Duke of Wellington as the ultimate trophy for his victory at Waterloo.

Completed in the summer of 1822, the Magdalene was one of the two last sculptures the master made before his death on October 13th, 1822. The other, The Sleeping Endymion and his Dog, was commissioned by the 6th Duke of Devonshire and has been on display in the Sculpture Gallery of Chatsworth House ever since. After Canova’s death, the Duchess of Devonshire wrote to Lord Liverpool:

“My dear Lord Liverpool . . . You will with the rest of Europe have mourned over Canova – it is a loss truly irreparable, & which I cannot think of without tears . . . you & Duke of Devonshire [who commissioned the Endymion] have the last strokes of his chisel . . . “.

After Lord Liverpool’s death, the Magdalene passed to his son Charles. It left the family after Charles’ death when it was sold at auction in 1852 to William, the 11th Baron Ward. The catalogue listed it as “one of the finest and most highly finished works of Canova,” and it was exhibited at high-profile events for years after that. In 1920, Ward’s sold his ancestral estate and all of its contents to a carpet manufacturer. One of those contents was the Recumbent Magdalene, but somehow in this transfer of ownership, the attribution was lost.

It acquired a new identity as a garden sculpture in the 1950s and the current owner bought it in 2002 at a sale of garden statuary.

The current owners, reported by the Financial Times as a British couple, contacted the London-based advisor Francis Outred who led a team that made the discovery. A condition report finds that a crucifix on the figure’s shoulder is now largely missing, but that the work is in otherwise “very good” condition.

“This work has been searched for by scholars for decades, so the discovery is of fundamental importance for the history of collecting and the history of art,” says Mario Guderzo, a leading Canova scholar and former director of the Museo Gypsotheca Antonio Canova in Possagno, Italy. A plaster model of the work, made in 1819, is held at the museum.

The work will go on show this weekend at Christie’s London and then tour to New York (8-13 April) and Hong Kong (27 May-1 June). The sale coincides with the bicentenary year of Canova’s death.