Category: Modern(ish)

Bronze Neptune from Lyon arrives in Rome

Ancient, Modern(ish), Museums

The Neptune of Lyon, one of the largest and most important bronze statues from Roman Gaul, has arrived in Rome for a one-time guest starring appearance at the Giovanni Barracco Museum of Ancient Sculpture. The statue is in the permanent collection of the Lugdunum Musée et Théâtres Romains in Lyon, and is being loaned to the sculpture museum as part of an extraordinary exchange of ancient works between the two cities.

The statue is 4’8″ in height and stands on a round base. It was made of hollow cast bronze in a local workshop in the 3rd century A.D. It is the largest bronze statue of Neptune ever discovered in France, and one of the largest surviving bronzes from Roman Gaul.

His “wet curls” hairstyle (a cap of curls clinging close to the head as if he’d just emerged from the water) identifies him as Neptune rather than another wavy-haired bearded deity like Zeus. While the objects he was holding in his hands were lost, the position of his hands compared to other statues suggest he originally held a trident in his left hand and a dolphin in his right.

The bronze was discovered in the Rhône river, between the Hôtel-Dieu bridge and the Guillotière bridge in 1859. The large size of the statue indicate it was publicly placed in a temple by the river, perhaps erected by the “renunclarii,” the guild of boatmen who dedicated a marble statue of Neptune just down the Rhône at Arles. Shortly after its discovery, the statue was given to the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, at that time home to city’s archaeology collection. It was transferred to the Lugdunum Musée et Théâtres Romains, the museum dedicated to the Roman history of Lyon, after it opened in 1975.

In honor of its 50th anniversary, the museum is running a major exhibition C’est canon. L’art chez les Romains, which explores Roman attitudes towards art and artists. It brings together an unprecedented assemblage of statues, reliefs, jewelry and artifacts from other museums in France and Italy. Many of the pieces on loan from French museums have never been seen before in Lyon, and a number of masterpieces from museums in Italy have never been seen before in France.

The Giovanni Barracco Museum, part of the Rome Capital Museum System, is one of Rome’s most sparkling and least known gems. Giovanni Barracco was a Calabrian nobleman, intellectual and politician who served as member of parliament and senator for years. He was an avid collector of ancient sculpture, putting together great works of Egyptian, Assyrian, Cypriot, Etruscan, Greek and Roman art.

He was highly selective and had impeccable taste, so when he generously decided to donate his sculpture collection to the City of Rome, it consisted of 200 exceptional pieces. The city gave him a plot of land on the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele and he worked closely with the architect to design a charming Neo-Classical building with a façade designed to look like an Ionic temple to house his small but spectacular collection.

The museum opened in 1905, so it celebrated its 120th anniversary as the Lugdunum Musée et Théâtres Romains celebrated its 50th. It is now undergoing renovations, and while some spaces are unavailable, the Lyon Neptune will be the centerpiece of the ground floor gallery. The exhibition opened yesterday and will run through June 7th.

Victorian school slates, marbles found in London

Modern(ish)

An excavation in central London has uncovered the remains of a boys school complete with artifacts from the students’ schoolwork and their playtime. The objects include a slate tablet used as an erasable notebook to practice handwriting, a slate pencil and several ceramic alleys — marbles made of decorated white ceramic — from the Victorian era. Artifacts related to children’s lives are less frequently found than ones relating to adults, so these objects give us a special glimpse into the lives of schoolboys.

A team from the Museum of London Archaeology (MoLA) excavated the site in the dockland district of Wapping ahead of development, uncovering the remains of a chapel, alms houses, terraced housing and associated cesspits as well as the school. The structures date to between 1500 and 1800, and the schools and alms houses were still active there in the 1870s.

The school was founded in 1536 by Sheriff of London Nicholas Gibson and his wife Avice. It was dedicated to the education of 60 poor boys. The couple also founded the alms houses for widowed women of limited means in the same location. After Nicholas Gibson’s death, Avice handed over management of the institutions to the Worshipful Company of Coopers, the barrel-makers guild which was well-funded and charitably inclined. The school still exists today, although it moved from Wapping in the late 19th century and is now a co-ed secondary school of excellent academic reputation known as the Coopers’ Company and Coborn School in Upminster.

The marbles date to the last stage of the school’s presence at the site. They were discovered in a Victorian-era brick lined drain. It’s possible they were lost in a rousing game of marbles during recess at the school. The name “alleys” is short for alabaster, and they were decorated with green, red, purple and blue stripes and swirls to make them look like veined alabaster. (I think they look more like planets or plaids.)

The corner of a slate writing tablet was found next to the drain. It is covered with what look like grid lines, scribbles and a looped handwriting. Paper was not readily available to schools in the 19th century. Slate tablets were used for math and handwriting exercises, done with a sharped slate cylinder that made a lighter grey mark on the dark tablet. The pencil marks could be wiped clean with a cloth or sponge. Tablets were usually set in a wooden frame and could be pierced with a hole at the top to tie the pencil to the tablet. This tablet fragment has none of the wood frame remaining, but it does have a hole at the top.

$40 estate sale find by early African-American silversmith sells for $24,000

Modern(ish)

A unique silver pap boat made by pioneering American silversmith of African descent Peter Bentzon has been sold to an as-yet unnamed “prominent American institution” for $24,000 after being discovered at an estate sale in Minnesota in a $40 box labelled “silverplate.” The young buyer spotted Bentzon’s hallmark and realized he’d hit the estate sale jackpot.

A pap boat is a shallow elongated bowl with a pouring rim on one side that was used to feed babies or sick people with a thin porridge (aka pap). The pap was highly digestible nourishment that could be given to someone who was too young or too ill to chew. The boat-like shape and pouring lip made holding the bowl and feeding easier. This one is less than five inches long and three inches wide. It weighs 69 grams. The flat bottom of the boat is stamped P. BENTZON in capital letters embedded in a rectangle. It dates to between 1810 and 1820.

Peter Bentzon was the only silversmith of African descent working in early America whose silver pieces can be identified by his personal hallmark. He was born on the island of Saint Thomas to a mother of mixed Afro-Caribbean heritage and a white European father believed to have been Norwegian Jacob Bentzon, a lawyer and royal judge advocate on the island. Peter was just eight years old when he was sent to Philadelphia to become an apprentice to a silversmith. He worked there from 1799 to 1806, then moved back to the Caribbean where he opened his own shop in Christiansted, St. Croix. He worked there for 10 years, marrying Rachel de la Motta, a free woman of color from a prominent family and ultimately having seven children.

Bentzon and his family moved back and forth between St. Croix and Philadelphia. He had an active trading business as well as the silversmith shop. He must have passed for white in Philadelphia as the 1820 census listed both him and his mixed wife as white. They last appear on the census in 1850, and there are no records of his death.

Fewer than 30 pieces of Bentzon silver are known to survive today. Most of them are small flatware (teaspoons) or implements like a nutmeg grater that sold for $40,000 at Sotheby’s in 2021. His two largest and most famous pieces are a pair of identical teapots made for Rebecca Dawson, member of a prominent Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist family, in 1817. One of them is now in the Saint Louis Art Museum; the other in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Even his teaspoons are in museums. The Philadelphia Art Museum has one, and another well-known piece: a footed cup he made in 1841 for Reverend Benjamin Lucock, a presentation gift from the superintendent and teachers of St. John’s Episcopal Church Sunday School in St. Croix.

Tiffany Garden Landscape window in new home at the Met

Modern(ish), Museums

The magnificent triple window by Louis Comfort Tiffany studio of a lush garden landscape, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late 2023 has been installed in the museum’s American Wing.

The window was designed by Agnes Northrop, one of Tiffany’s premier designers and a pioneer in the landscape style of art glass windows. Northrop and the studio’s workshop of largely female glass cutters known as the “Tiffany Girls” selected, made, cut and composed thousands of pieces of glass, utilizing innovative techniques to create the rich profusion of trees and flowers.

It was commissioned by coal queen Sarah Cochran for Linden Hall, the grand estate she had built in Dawson, Pennsylvania, in 1912. Inspired by Linden Hall’s actual garden, the landscape window depicts a beautiful walled garden full of flowers — hydrangeas, poppies, nasturtiums, foxglove, peonies, hollyhocks — with an elegant fountain in the middle ground against a backdrop of pines and mountains in the distant background.

Last month, the Met posted a fascinating and surprisingly touching video about the installation of this magical masterpiece. You get to see close-up the variety of glass types in the window. The glass conservator’s repair of one piece that had shifted provides a fascinating glimpse into how this thing was put together. The panes in Tiffany landscapes aren’t individually joined with lead came strips or copper foil like traditional stained glass windows are. There’s minimal solder and ultra-thin backing glass. Seeing the delicacy of the construction, it’s amazing that the Garden Landscape window has survived being dismantled into its component panels (nine large and nine smaller ones) and moved at least twice.

The video concludes by showcasing the majestic triple window in its new home in the Charles Engelhard Court of the American Wing. There are several views of the entrance loggia with four columns Tiffany designed for his own home, Laurelton Hall, in Oyster Bay, Long Island. The intricate columns with their flowered capitals and geometric mosaic architrave frame the window when viewed from the middle of the courtyard where stands a half-sized variant of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Madison Square Garden bronze statue of Diana.

Goethe’s amber ant

Ancient, Modern(ish)

German philosopher, poet, novelist, travel writer, government official and all-around polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was also an avid natural scientist. He wrote treatises on botany, rediscovered the human premaxillary bone by examining an elephant skull, studied light and color theory and played a central role in developing morphology as a scientific discipline. He amassed huge collections of minerals, animal specimens and other natural objects. At the time of his death in 1832, he left behind the largest private collection of geological and mineralogical specimens in Europe, more than 18,000 objects. Goethe’s entire collection is now housed in the Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar, and many of the specimens are still in the same boxes with the same labels handwritten by the philosopher.

He had about 40 pieces of amber in his collection, classified as a combustible fossil resin. Goethe never made any reference to ancient insects in his or any other amber specimens. His interest in amber was for its optical properties, like a crystal or a prism, as part of his study of color theory. Now, an international team of researchers led by scientists from Friedrich Schiller University Jena have identified three insect inclusions in two of Goethe’s amber specimens. One amber piece contained the remains of two nematoceran black flies in poor condition; the second contained a worker ant in excellent condition.

The ant is a member of the extinct Ctenobethylus goepperti species that lived during the Eocene, ca. 47–34 million years ago. While they are relatively common in Baltic amber, this example is exceptionally well-preserved, giving the research team the opportunity to create a 3D reconstruction of the ant from synchrotron radiation-based micro-computed tomography scans. This revealed two parts of the endoskeleton that had never before been seen in Cenozoic fossil ants.

Amber can preserve biological structure at unparalleled fidelity, and the Goethe collection, preserved through cultural significance rather than scientific design, has now yielded new insights through modern imaging. Our phenomic redefinition of †Ctenobethylus goepperti demonstrates the continued potential and relevance of historical collections for systematic revision and paleobiological interpretation. Through this lens, Goethe’s own epistemological commitment to observation, metamorphosis, and morphological synthesis finds renewed relevance. […]

In a poetic inversion, we now use advanced imaging tools to peer through the same amber Goethe once used to explore vision. While Goethe opposed artificial enhancements of perception in principle, he embraced tools like microscopes and prisms when they aided genuine observation. This study honors that spirit by integrating visual technology with empirical inquiry and highlights the enduring value of historical collections for modern science.