Category: Multimedia

A jolly holly horror to you!

Modern(ish), Multimedia

Here’s an early Christmas present for all you boys and girls, if you consider triggering a gamut of emotions from uncomfortable to sheer terror a festive gift.

"Twinkle, twinkle little star" ; Edison Talking Doll cylinder, brown wax ; Rolfs collection. Photo courtesy National Parks Service.I’ve posted several stories about the first “talking” dolls, the products of Thomas Edison’s infinite ability to find new markets for his technologies. They were 22″-tall cyborgs with metal torsos that held miniature versions of Edison’s phonograph. A crank on the back was turned to play the short songs engraved first on tin and then on wax cylinders. Even with pretty bisques faces, arms and legs and dressed in frilly finery, their weight, difficult operation and tendency to break made them unpopular with the target audience of young girls. Edison sold fewer than 500 Talking Dolls and many of them were returned due to defects, mainly scratched and eroded cylinders that no longer played.

With the wax cylinders easily damaged and the early tin cylinders easily deformed, surviving Edison Talking Doll cylinders were muted for decades. Technology eventually came to the aid of the history of technology when the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California developed the IRENE-3D optical scanner capable of reading the surface of historical media without any contact. The first resurrected Edison doll recording was an absolutely chilling Little Jack Horner recovered from a tin cylinder in the collection of the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey. A distinctly less threatening Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star emerged the next year.

I’ve just stumbled on another six of them. Eight of the cylinders known to survive of the different rhymes spoken by the Edison Talking Doll (including the above-mentioned Little Jack Horner and Twinkle, Twinkle) have been digitized by the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Massachusetts using the IRENE-3D scanning technology. They’ve all been uploaded to the National Parks Service website in both unrestored and restored versions.

My recommendations: Hickory, dickory, dock is thoroughly bloodcurdling, as is this second version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and Now I lay me down to sleep should ensure you never will again. The time you would have one spent sleeping peacefully you can while away by reading this fascinating Cultural History of the Edison Talking Doll Record. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page for each recording to browse photos of the associated dolls, mechanisms and cylinders.

Artemisia exhibition film: a review

Multimedia, Museums

This year London’s National Gallery is putting on the first exhibition in the UK dedicated solely to Baroque master Artemisia Gentileschi. The exhibition has been postponed twice due to COVID and is currently shut down until December 2nd. With major showcases like this that rely on priceless artworks loaned from other collections, changing the dates requires an enormous amount of effort and forbearance, not to mention expense, and with in-person museum attendance in ashes right now, the National Gallery is offering a curator-led film tour of the exhibition on demand for £8.

It’s an idea with possibilities, even under non-pandemic circumstances, and I was curious to see whether it was worth the price of admission, so I booked a ticket. You do you have to create an account on the National Gallery website first ; name, email, phone number and address are all required. You are allowed a single “booking,” which will grant your account access to the film tour for 48 hours. The film can only be viewed on the National Gallery website. To watch, click your email address in the upper right of the screen, and select “online films” from the menu listing under “My account” on the left. Click the Watch Now button to view.

The movie is hosted by Letizia Treves, the museum’s curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French 17th-century Paintings. She walks through the galleries, starting with works from Artemisia’s early years in Rome. Treves gives a brief biography of Artemisia and introduces the viewer to the artist’s first signed work, Susannah and the Elders, painted when she was 17 years old. Treves then relays how Artemisia was raped by her father’s colleague Agostino Tassi and how we know every detail of the ensuing trial because the original transcripts have survived. That transcript is on display in this gallery, loaned out for the first time by the State Archive in Rome.

Treves continues a chronological narration of Artemisia’s life and moves to the next gallery featuring works from her time in Florence. She painted some of her most famous pieces during this time, including two versions of Judith Beheading Holofernes, which Treves focuses on in her explanation. She then moves to the other side of the room and a series of self-portraits.

Artemisia achieved fame and success as an artist in Florence, enough that she became both author and subject of commissioned portraits when she returned to Rome. In the next gallery is a portrait of her done by another artist and portraits she made of noble subjects, but the real get are letters she wrote to her lover, rediscovered in 2011 in the Archivio Frescobaldi and on display here for the first time. Treves doesn’t read any of them verbatim, sadly, but she does summarize a few intriguing passages.

The next gallery features works from Artemisia’s artistic peak, paintings of Biblical and Classical motifs with women protagonists — Judith, Susannah, Mary Magdalene, Lucretia — done in dramatic light to satisfy buyers’ tastes for Caravaggismo. The works shift in scale and subject in the next gallery, following her move to Naples. Then under Spanish rule, Naples offered Artemisia a wide international pool of patrons, and it’s here that she painted her first monumental altarpieces. These were also her first collaborative works.

Except for a brief stay in London, she would live in Naples until her death, expanding her repertoire to literary subjects and allegories. The next gallery features a monumental Birth of St. John the Baptist she painted for the King of Spain and her last documented painting, a Susannah and the Elders. The final gallery in the show presents paintings she and her father Orazio, who were reunited in London, made in the closing years of their careers. One allegory, a personification of painting, that is likely a self-portrait is the only work documented to have been painted when she was in London.

Once the walkthrough of the exhibition’s galleries is concluded, Trevers takes a closer look at a few highlight pieces: the earliest Susannah, Judith sawing Holofernes’ head off in gore aplenty, Judith and her maidservant with the head of Holofernes in a basket, a later Susannah and the Birth of St John the Baptist.

So was the film worth the price of admission? It was interesting and a nice overview of an exhibition I’ll never get to see, but it was a little sparse for my taste. It’s short at just under half an hour, and it felt like Trevers was in a rush (which she was). Also, there was a missed opportunity here to mix media. In my ideal guided tour, there would be links that allow you to explore gigapixel images of the works themselves, plus transcripts and translations of the documents.

No regrets whatsoever, though. Museums have been brutalized this year, and I’ll gladly pay 10 bucks for content. They generate so much of it for free, it’s the very, VERY least I could do.

Remember, Remember

Modern(ish), Multimedia

Happy Guy Fawkes Day! To commemorate the 415th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, the UK National Archives has posted a great blog about how they’ve used their new multispectral imaging system on letters between the plotters that has secret messages written in orange juice. Just like the lemon juice letters of many of childhoods, the orange juice letters fade when they dry only to reappear again when the paper is heated.

Four centuries after they written, some of the secret ink letters are hard to read with the naked eye. Imaging in non-RGB areas of the electromagnetic spectrum like ultraviolet and infrared can drastically increase readability of the once-invisible ink.

Both inks are visible in a RGB colour photograph to varying degrees (top left) but imaging in the ultraviolet (UV) region of the electromagnetic spectrum increases the readability of the orange juice (top right).

To image this way, the letter is illuminated with UV light and the reflected UV light is recorded. Both the orange juice and iron gall ink absorb UV light, making the inks appear darker. Reflectance images appear on a greyscale but by combining a RGB colour photograph with a UV reflectance image we can create a false colour image (bottom left). These images keep the luminance of the UV image and blend it with the hue and saturation of the RGB colour photo, allowing for a more intuitive reading of the information on the letter.

The final image I took was an image in the infrared (IR) region of the electromagnetic spectrum (bottom right). Imaging in the IR region is frequently used to reveal underdrawings and concealed features. This is because the radiation penetrates deeper into the material and many materials, like organic pigments, become transparent.

In the IR region the orange juice completely disappears because it is an organic material. However the iron gall ink which contains iron salts is still partly visible, enabling us to clearly distinguish the two types of inks.

Another Guy Fawkes-themed offering from the National Archives is this podcast from 2009 which tells the story of the Gunpowder Plot and the subsequent investigation using a selection of documents from the archives to explore events from the perspective of eye witnesses.

Last but not least is an absolutely devilish online jigsaw puzzle of Guy Fawkes’ confession letter.

Incidentally, just in case you happen to be in the market for a number of soothingly distracting rabbitholes to fall into, the National Archives has tons of great video and audio content. I first discovered got into it in August when I watched the Stinking Fish, Beer and Brewing Controversies around 1800 live webinar which was even more interesting and entertaining than the title already suggested it would be. Since then, I’ve been going through their archived video and audio and there isn’t a dud in the bunch. The Film of the Month and What’s Online features tend to be my favorite videos, but it’s all gold, and the podcasts may well be the most information-rich ones I’ve ever heard. There are entire conferences from keynote addresses to panel sessions available, and the podcasts cover everything from topical issues to how to use public records — wills, census data, birth/marriage/death registers — to the curse(s) of Tutankhamun.

Is this the self-portrait of mason hidden in a column capital?

Medieval, Modern(ish), Multimedia

Carved figure that may be self-portrait of mason on column capital in the nave of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Photo courtesy Jennifer Alexander.A possible self-portrait of a mason has been discovered carved in the capital of a column inside the nave of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The Easter egg was spotted by art historian Dr. Jennifer Alexander during a detailed survey the 11th century cathedral’s Romanesque architecture.

Alexander was conducting a stone-by-stone analysis to work out its construction sequence, in a project funded by the Galician regional government. It was when she was studying the capitals, about 13 metres above the pavement, that “this little figure popped out”, she recalled.

“A lovely image of a chap hanging on to the middle of the capital as if his life depended on it. It’s in a row of identical off-the-peg capitals where they’ve been knocking them out in granite – ‘we need another 15 of that design’ – and suddenly there’s one that’s different. So we think it’s the man himself.

Some of the column capitals in the central nave of the church have uniquely-carved variants featuring animals, angels, devils, Biblical scenes and the like. They imparted at-a-glance theology to the thousands of pilgrims who flocked to the cathedral, and added visual drama to the space. Those capitals are in less obscure locations, however, and this guy is a little too regular compared to the fantastical and Biblical figures on the splashier capitals.

The carved figure is about a foot high and has a round face with large ears reminiscent of a Dr. Bunsen Honeydew with eyes and no glasses. His arms are bent at the elbow so they can comfortably nestle in the chevron shapes formed by the wide banana leaves decorating the capital, basically in a shrug emoji posture. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ His right hand is curled into a fist. He has no left hand. He could be a mason, sure. Then again he could not be one too.

In other Santiago de Compostela news, The Portico of Glory, the cathedral’s high-drama three-arched entrance façade built in the 12th century by French architect Master Mateo, underwent a 12-year program of restoration that was completed in 2018. As much as possible, the polychrome paint on the portico’s 200+ figures was conserved, but much of it was lost centuries ago and what remains is mostly the result of later interventions. During the restoration work, the portico was documented in unprecedented detail with more than 2,700 gigapixel photographs capturing every inch of the elaborately-decorated  surfaces. Those photographs were converted into a digital 3D model and made available in a ground-breaking free app that allows users to crawl over every last detail of The Portico of Glory, see it before and after restoration, learn about the deterioration of the carvings and the treatments, all accompanied by an audio tour.

The app goes a giant step beyond the visuals with the music. The characters on the portico include 21 who bear musical instruments. Researchers recreated those instruments in 3D and then recreated the music they played, so while you examine the masterpiece of medieval art, you are accompanied by a soundtrack that not only matches the period, but the specific musicians on the archway itself. It is unbelievable, truly.

You can download The Portico of Glory app for iOS here and for Android here.

Hittite cuneiform texts digitized

Ancient, Multimedia

A team led by researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz will be fully transcribing, translating and digitizing a vast collection of 30,000 Hittite-language cuneiform tablets engraved on clay in Anatolia 3,500 years ago, fired and preserved. The project has just been funded to the tune of EUR 520,000 and is expected to take three years.

“This enormous funding can also be seen as recognition of Mainz as a research hub, where Hittitology has been a mainstay since the 1960s,” said Professor Doris Prechel of the Department of Ancient Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and partner in the collaborative project. The Hittitology Archive at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz holds the world’s largest collection of transliterated Hittite writings, in other words, texts which have been converted from the original cuneiform into the Latin alphabet. “We have a fantastic starting point here, and with the digital thesaurus we can achieve a breakthrough for Hittitology worldwide.” Prechel and her group at JGU will be contributing to the project by compiling a collection of texts on summoning rituals. These rituals mostly took the form of magical invocations designed, among other things, to gain the goodwill of the gods and protect the royal family or the political system from danger.

The cooperation partners intend to bring the remains of the Hittite culture into the 21st century. A large proportion of the 30,000 clay tablets and fragments found in the then Hittite capital of Hattusa and documented on over one million index cards are already available in digitized form. They will now be suitably adapted and provided with commentaries. The collection of texts will be accessible online via the new Hittitology Platform Mainz. It will also be possible to integrate any new cuneiform texts found at Hittite sites in future. Thus, the new platform will be a kind of living archive of cuneiform transcripts and make available a completely new way of accessing source texts for researching the culture and history of the Hittites.

The project will have other research applications as well because Hittite is the oldest known surviving Indo-European language, the language group that includes all of the languages of Europe, northern India and the Persian Plateau. Most people in the world spread out over all the populated continents speak one.

The current Hittitology Platform Mainz already has a large database of digitized Hittite tablets, but it’s a little unwieldy to navigate, is mostly in German and if there are any photographs in the digitized entries, I haven’t found them yet. It will be greatly expanded over the next three years.