The History Blog

In August 1471, eager to secure control of the strategically important Moroccan cities at the entrance to the Straits of Gibraltar, King of Portugal Afonso V attacked the coastal walled city of Asilah. Asilah fell, followed two days later by Tangier which was handed over to the Portuguese by the governor of Asilah. The conquest of Tangier would give Portugal control over maritime traffic between the Mediterranean and Atlantic until 1661, and on a personal note, gave King Afonso the satisfaction of succeeding where his kingly uncles had failed.

It also earned him brownie points with the Church, which had been actively encouraging colonialist crusades since Pope Nicholas V’s 1452 bull Dum Diversas first exhorted the kings of Spain and Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property [...] and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.”

To commemorate these glorious victories, four monumental tapestries, each measuring 12 by 36 feet, were commissioned from Flemish weavers in Tournai, Belgium. Begun just a few years after the battles, Landing at Asilah, Siege of Asilah, Assault on Asilah and The Conquest of Tangier were woven from the finest wool and silk and depict the Portuguese conquest as the epitome of chivalric heroism.

Probably produced under the direction of Passchier Grenier, tapestry merchant, Tournai (Belgium), 1470s, Landing at Asilah, 1475-1500, wool and silk, 144-7/8 x 436-1/4 in., Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain. © Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.

Their advanced age, immense size, intense colors and riot of details would make these tapestries rare and marvelous by any standard, but they are also some of the earliest tapestries to depict a contemporary event instead of the allegorical, mythological and religious subjects covered by the vast majority of Gothic tapestry.

Probably produced under the direction of Passchier Grenier, tapestry merchant, Tournai (Belgium), 1470s, Siege of Asilah, 1475-1500, wool and silk, 168-1/2 x 424-7/16 in., Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain. © Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.

The Flemish weavers, amazing geniuses though they obviously were, weren’t so clear on what North African cities and people looked like, so Asilah and Tangier look remarkably like North European cities, complete with flora that are characteristic filler material in Tournai weavings. They were familiar with the Portuguese, however, so Afonso’s forces are depicted in accurate detail, leaving us an incredibly rare encyclopedic visual record of 15th century military regalia.

Probably produced under the direction of Passchier Grenier, tapestry merchant, Tournai (Belgium), 1470s, Assault on Asilah, 1475-1500, wool and silk, 145-1/4 x 432-11/16 in., Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain. © Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.

All of this beauty might have been lost along with so many other Portuguese treasures during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the tsunami and fires that devastated the area in its aftermath. What saved the Pastrana tapestries is what gives them their name: by the time of the earthquake, the tapestries were kept in a parish church in Pastrana, Spain. We don’t know exactly how they got there, but one prominent theory is that they were given to Philip II of Spain in the late 16th century during the period of Iberian Union, when the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were joined under Philip’s sole rule.

Probably produced under the direction of Passchier Grenier, tapestry merchant, Tournai (Belgium), 1470s, The Conquest of Tangier, 1475-1500, wool and silk, 157-1/2 x 426 in., Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain. © Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.

In the remote Church of Our Lady of the Assumption at Pastrana, the tapestries remained safe for centuries. They were only removed briefly during the Spanish Civil War to keep them from danger. Still, after hundreds of years, the tapestries were caked with dirt, snacked on by moths, faded from light damage and from the natural deterioration of the dyes. In 2008, a number of organizations worked together with the Fundación Carlos de Amberes to raise money for a complete conservation of the tapestries.

All four tapestries were sent to Belgium, their land of origin, to be conserved by the experts at the Royal Manufacturers De Wit in Mechlin. By all accounts they did a stupendous job. The conservation of the tapestries received a 2011 Europa Nostra Award.

Thus restored to their former splendor, the tapestries have been traveling since 2010. Brussels, Lisbon, Toledo and Madrid got to see them first; then they went overseas to the United States. The exhibit, The Invention of Glory: Afonso V and the Pastrana Tapestries, first stopped at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from September 18, 2011 through January 8, 2012. The tapestries are now at the Meadows Museum in Dallas until May 13, 2012. Then they move on to the San Diego Museum of Art from June 10 to September 9, and lastly to the Indianapolis Museum of Art from October 5 to January 6, 2013.

The National Gallery of Art website has a pdf version of the exhibition wall panels which explain the overall action in each tapestry and pull out some salient details.

The Graffiti House in Brandy Station, Virginia was built in 1858 next to the train tracks. Though a small town, Brandy Station saw a lot of activity during the Civil War because of its location at the junction of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad — the sole rail line linking Confederate capital Richmond with Union capital Washington, D.C. — and of the roads leading to two major fords of the Rappahannock River. The house is thought to have been used as a hospital by both Confederate and Union troops, many of whom left their autographs and sketches of girls, horses, birds, soldiers and more on the second floor walls to mark their stay.

It’s their graffiti that has given the house its moniker, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, the homeowners weren’t keen to preserve the doodles soldiers had scribbled all over the walls using charcoal from the fireplaces and the occasional pencil. The owners whitewashed all that tasty social history. Thankfully, a thin layer of dirt and soot had accumulated over the graffiti, keeping the whitewash from destroying the charcoal markings.

Over the years, the house passed through many hands, some of which made some unfortunately damaging repairs. The graffiti were forgotten until a 1993 renovation stripped off some wallpaper and old paint to reveal the treasures beneath. Despite the rediscovery of this important history, by 2002 the house was derelict. People took chunks of plaster off the wall just to ensure that some part of the graffiti would be preserved when the house was, as seemed inevitable, demolished. This dire fate was avoided thanks to the Brandy Station Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the natural and historical patrimony of the town, which purchased the house in August 2002.

They restored the house and hired conservator Chris Mills of Christopher Mills Conservation Services out of New York City to work on the graffiti walls starting last year. He has had to stabilize the walls because the 1858 plaster is coming off the wooden lathing, and while he’s at it, he is painstakingly removing the whitewash using q-tips and razor blades, revealing new graffiti and reviving faded ones.

In some cases, previous owners have used strips of porous tape, covered with some type of spackling, to keep the cracks from widening. Removing these foreign substances makes Mills’ job even tougher and results in some minor but unavoidable damage to the graffiti underneath.

Once the tape is removed, Mills pins the cracked plaster to the laths with nail-like plastic fasteners. When the pins are removed, the holes they made are used to inject an alcohol solution into the plaster.

“Then I inject a synthetic resin that adheres the wood lath to the plaster,” Mills says, adding that he makes the substance himself. As it dries, the alcohol solution helps pull the heavier synthetic resin into the hole, says Mills.

The Brandy Station Foundation has researched all the identifiable signatures. Cavalry units dominate, which dovetails neatly with the history of the town because the Battle of Brandy Station (June 9, 1863) was the largest cavalry battle of the war, in fact the largest cavalry battle in United States history.

General J.E.B. Stuart, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia Cavalry, led the Confederate cavalry in the Battle of Brandy Station. Many of the signatures are from members of Stuart’s cavalry, and one very large prominent signature is J.E.B. Stuart’s own. We don’t know for sure that he wrote it, but the Brandy Station Foundation has some copies of his confirmed signature hanging on the wall next to the graffito and they sure do look a lot alike.

The Foundation was also able to match a signature to a face. Here’s Private Michael Bowman of the 7th Virginia Cavalry, his signature and a period picture of him in uniform:

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was copied by other artists and his students starting almost as soon as it was made in the first decades of the 16th century. Some of them have been advanced as Leonardo originals, at least in part (see the Isleworth Mona Lisa, for example), and others have always been known to be copies. One of these known copies is in the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Prado experts thought it was painted relatively early in the 16th century by an anonymous artist, but with its black painted background, bright red sleeves, and relatively flat shadowing compared to the velvety depth of da Vinci’s original, the Prado’s Mona Lisa didn’t get much attention. They also thought the wood was oak, which was used by northern European artists.

Last year curators took a closer look in anticipation of an upcoming loan to the Louvre. They found that the panel was actually walnut, a commonly used wood for oil paintings in 16th century Italy. Using infrared reflectography, they then found that underneath that dull black background was a beautiful Tuscan landscape almost identical to the one behind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

IR also revealed the copy’s underdrawings, sketches that painters make before they start with the paint. The Louvre took IR images of the Mona Lisa in 2004. When the Prado curators compared the two sets of underdrawings, they found that they matched, suggesting that the copy was made contemporaneously with the original, following the changes to the composition as the master drew them before the final version was painted. There are documentary sources that attest to Leonardo having his students paint alongside him in the studio, but this is the first time we have IR evidence that strongly indicates contemporaneous painting.

Conservators have spent the past year removing the black overpaint — probably added in the 18th century to make it match other pieces with a black background in a gallery setting — and revealed the refreshed Mona Lisa copy in a presentation two weeks ago at London’s National Gallery.

The Prado’s technical specialist Ana González Mozo describes the Madrid replica as “a high quality work,” and in the paper she presented at the London conference, she provided evidence that the picture was done in Leonardo’s studio. The precise date of the original is uncertain, although the Louvre states it was between 1503 and 1506.

Bruno Mottin, the head conservator at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, believes that the most likely painter of the Prado copy was one of Leonardo’s two favourite pupils.

Mottin proposes that it was either Andrea Salai, who originally joined Leonardo’s studio in 1490 and probably became his lover, or Francesco Melzi, who joined around 1506. If the Prado replica is eventually attributed to Melzi, it suggests a late date for the original.

There is at least one other copy of Mona Lisa attributed to Salai and it doesn’t look as good as the Prado’s copy to my eye, although that could be the picture. He also painted Monna Vanna, a nude parody of Mona Lisa.

Salai’s reputation was more about his bad boy living than about the skill of his painting. Leonardo complained about Salai all the time in his notebooks, describing him as a “ladro, bugiardo, ostinato, ghiotto” (thief, liar, obstinate, glutton) whom Leonardo had to bail out of scrape after scrape. Still, he must have had something going for him since da Vinci lived with the youth from the time he was 10 years old until he was 35. Leonardo even left his enfant terrible property and paintings after his death in 1519, including the real Mona Lisa which Salai sold to King Francis I of France.

The Prado’s discovery might shed some light on details of the original. There are areas of the Prado Mona Lisa that are in much better condition than on the original — the spindles of the chair, for example, and the veil around her left arm — and Lisa herself looks considerably younger without that yellow cracked varnish that darkens and muddies her facial features in the original.

The copy is in the final stages of conservation. It will be displayed at the Prado in a few weeks, then it will go on loan to the Louvre for its exhibition with Leonardo’s Saint Anne (March 19 – June 25) where it will be back in the same room with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa for the first time in 500 years or so.

Researchers at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park have discovered that 17 unlabeled wax cylinder phonograph records found stashed in a cabinet behind Edison’s cot back in 1957 contain extremely rare recordings made in Europe in 1889 and 1890, including the only known recording of Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German Empire.

Two [of the wax cylinders] preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings — the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.) Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures — lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.

Since they weren’t labeled or cataloged, nobody had any idea what was on them until last year when Edison laboratory curator Jerry Fabris used an Archeophone device to trace the grooves on 12 of the cylinders and convert them to audible wav files. The recordings were very faint, too faint for Fabris to identify, so he enlisted the aid of sound historians Patrick Feaster of Indiana University and Stephan Puille of the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin to try to determine who and what were on the cylinders.

They had a starting point: the words “Wangemann. Edison” carved into the lid of the wooden container in which the cylinders had been found. Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann had been hired by Edison in 1888 to market his newly invented wax cylinder phonograph. Wangemann quickly became adept at recording with the phonograph and was sent to Europe in June of 1889 to supervise the operation of the Edison phonographs on exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair.

The assignment was only supposed to last two weeks, but after the World’s Fair was over Edison expanded his brief and allowed him to travel Europe collecting quality recordings to use for exhibitions. After Paris he went to his native country of Germany where he set up displays of the technology for scientists and luminaries. In Berlin, Wangemann set up his equipment in a room loaned to him by the Siemens Corporation. He carried the cylinders and accessories to the exhibition room in a lockable wooden box. It’s that box that was discovered back at Edison’s New Jersey lab in 1957.

Edison joined Wangemann in Germany to make a splash during the phonograph exhibits to scientists. While he was there, Edison asked to meet the three most important people in Germany, Bismarck, von Moltke and Kaiser Wilhelm II, but none of them were available. They all replied that they wanted to see the phonograph, though, so Edison sent Wangemann to show them the new toy and get their voices recorded for posterity. He did meet with them all, but although Wilhelm II greatly enjoyed Wangemann’s musical recordings, he never did get his own voice carved in wax. Three of his sons, the eldest just seven years old, did get recorded.

In Friedrichsruh on Oct. 7, 1889, Wangemann recorded Chancellor Otto von Bismarck reciting verses from several ditties in four languages. The first is “In Good Old Colony Times,” a British folk song that was altered after the American Revolution to give it an anti-monarchist spin. The second is “Als Kaiser Rotbart lobesam” (When good Emperor Redbeard), an 1814 German heroic ballad by Ludwig Uhland about Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa going on the Third Crusade. The third is the Latin song “Gaudeamus igitur,” a popular graduation song in Europe at the time with your classic “carpe diem” message. The fourth is the first verse of “La Marseillaise,” which is something of an enormous iceburn on the French given their ignominious defeat by Bismarck’s Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

The last lines Bismarck speaks are a direct appeal to his son Herbert who would listen to it on a phonograph in Budapest a few weeks later and recognize his father’s voice. “Do everything in moderation and morality, namely work, but then also eating, and apart from that especially drinking. Advice of a father to his son.” Solid Junker advice, that.

Read about all of the newly converted Edison/Wangemann wax cylinders, listen to the recordings and read the original text and transcripts of the spoken parts on the National Park Service website.

Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring will be touring three museums in the United States next year. The last time the Girl was in the US was in 1995, when it was on display at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art along with all 20 other known works by the 17th century Dutch painter.

That exhibition was a blockbuster success, but other works like View of Delft were considered the stars of the show. This time, she gets top billing above the likes of Rembrandt, probably because her popularity has skyrocketed since Tracy Chevalier’s eponymous novel was published in 2000 and the movie starring Scarlett Johansson as the model and Colin Firth as Vermeer hit theaters in 2003.

The new exhibition, “Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis,” features 35 important paintings by Dutch Golden Age masters including Vermeer, Rembrandt, Fans Hals and Jan Steen. The Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis in The Hague is housed in a 17th century palace which will be undergoing a major two-year renovation and expansion. It will close on April 1st and move its entire permanent collection to the Gemeentemuseum, also in The Hague.

The Mauritshuis collection will be on display there in its entirety from April 28, 2012 to May 28, 2012, and then the Girl with a Pearl Earring and her 34 escorts will begin touring the world. First they’ll go to Japan, from July until mid-September at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, then on to Kobe’s City Art Museum until January 2013.

Their first stop in the United States will be the de Young Museum of San Francisco where they’ll be on display from January 26, 2013 to June 2, 2013. Next up will be the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, which will host the exhibition between June 22, 2013 and September 29, 2013. This will be the first time Girl with a Pearl Earring has ever been seen in the southeast United States, so it will give a great many people a unique opportunity to see her in person.

The last stop on the US itinerary is the The Frick Collection in New York City from October 22, 2013 to January 12, 2014. After that the works head home to the Netherlands. They will be back on display at the newly expanded and renovated Mauritshuis by mid-year.

Through landscapes and portraits, the exhibition will explore the idea that Dutch artists more readily embraced genre paintings of secular subjects than their southern European contemporaries and focused on capturing commonplace scenes of daily life. Dutch artists not only recorded representations of the domestic interior, still lifes and revelrous crowds, but often imbued these scenes with moral undertones and humorous, sarcastic wit.

Key paintings featured in the exhibition include: Johannes Vermeer, “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” ca. 1665, Carel Fabritius, “Goldfinch,” 1654, Rembrandt van Rijn, “‘Tronie’ of a Man with a Feathered Beret,” ca. 1635, Jan Steen, “The Way You Hear It, Is The Way You Sing It,” ca. 1665, Jacob van Ruisdael, “View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds,” 1670–1675.

The National Park Service has carefully dismantled and removed an 1850′s bathroom from the Dunleith Historical Inn in Natchez, Mississippi. One of only 20 antique bathrooms remaining in the United States, the Dunleith lavatory had hot and cold running water, a bathtub, a shower and a commode that were all part of a single large piece of furniture. The shower wouldn’t be out of place in a luxury home today; it has a 10-inch rain showerhead. An immense 400-pound zinc-lined cistern once contained the hot water for the system. (There was also a separate wash table with a marble sink which isn’t in the bathroom anymore, but the NPS hope to secure nonetheless to complete the set.)

The bathroom is thought to have been installed in 1859 by Alfred Vidal Davis who bought the Greek revival mansion that year. When the National Park Service workers were removing the bathroom, they found a packing slip from New Orleans plumbing company Price & Coulon. NPS historian Jeff Mansell believes the entire system was available for purchase from a catalog, hence the packing slip.

It was installed on the third floor at the top of a forbiddingly steep staircase. Pipes carried water from the laundry room on the first floor where it was heated by boiler up to cisterns in the attic. When someone turned on the faucets or flushed the toilet, the cisterns drained down to the third floor. The toilet waste would then be piped to a septic tank that was also connected to the more traditional outhouses on the property.

That inconvenient third floor location saved its life, because bathrooms are gutted all the time but this one was so out of the way that subsequent owners never bothered renovating it. For the past decade it’s been used as a storage room. Now the Dunleith Historical Inn is renovating the space to make more room for paying guests. Recognizing the rarity and importance of the bathroom, they decided to donate the fixtures to the National Park Service.

The NPS accepted with alacrity, but removing the fixtures was an engineering challenge (LiveScience has a photo gallery of the process). Construction crews had to remove the commode, shower and bathtub separately, then build a ramp and use a forklift to get that 400-pound cistern out of the house.

For now the parts will be stored, but the NPS plans to install them in another Greek revival antebellum mansion: Melrose, a National Park Service property that dates to the 1840s. Melrose had some sort of washroom facility in the 1850s, but only the pipes remain so we can’t know what kind of fixtures were originally installed. The Dunleith bathroom will in all likelihood be installed in one of two dressing rooms at Melrose that are currently off-limit to guests.

Once the bathroom is installed, Mansell said, the room will be open for public viewing. He said he believes people will be surprised at the plumbing technology that was used in the bathroom.

“I don’t think (people) think of systems like this existing in the 19th century,” he said. [...]

[John Holyoak, manager of Dunleith Historical Inn,] said moving the bathroom’s contents from Dunleith will allow the rare technology to be preserved and displayed.

“If we leave that bathroom where it is, no one will ever see it,” he said. “The benefit of having it moved is that it will be set up as a public display and tourists will be able to see something extremely unique.”

Sign me up. I have had a passion for historical bathrooms since I was a little kid squatting on the Roman latrines at Ostia.

Okay, so you weren’t able to get to England or sell your kidney to buy a scalped ticket for the sold out blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition at London’s National Gallery. For the many of us all over the world in that sad boat, we will have to content ourselves with a viewing of an HD documentary on the exhibit: Leonardo Live (which isn’t live for us but was broadcast live originally).

Captured live on November 8, 2011, LEONARDO LIVE provides a virtual walk-through of the exhibit, with exclusive commentary from scholars and curators. Hosted by highly respected art historian Tim Marlow and presenter Mariella Frostrup, the exhibition brings together the largest number of da Vinci’s rare surviving painting and some international loans. While numerous exhibitions have looked at da Vinci as an inventor, scientist or draughtsman, this is the first to be dedicated to his aims and techniques as a painter.

When I last blogged about this, the screening dates hadn’t been published yet. Now they have and you can buy your tickets in advance. It opens in 450 theaters around the country on February 16. Since most of the screenings are a one-night-one-showing-only event, I suggest you book early. You can plug your zip code into this site to get a listing and map of the theaters nearest to you that are showing the movie.

For some fascinating background on the Herculean effort it took to put together this unprecedented exhibit, read this article from the Telegraph. It took five years from idea to exhibition, and it would never have happened if Queen Elizabeth II hadn’t agreed up front to allow Luke Syson, the National Gallery’s curator of Italian paintings before 1500, to offer loans of important Leonardo drawings from the Royal Collection in return for loans of Leonardo paintings.

So Syson started by negotiating the loan of the Lady with an Ermine from the Czartoryski Foundation in Cracow. Next he asked his colleagues at the Louvre for La Belle Ferronnière. With two such stunning portraits secured for the show, it would have been hard for Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan to turn down his request for Leonardo’s Portrait of a Musician, because with the addition of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks it looked like every surviving picture painted by Leonardo in Milan would be in the show.

Every picture he painted in Milan (the frescoes in the Castello Sforzesco and The Last Supper excluded, of course, on account of they’re attached to walls) is fully half the total number of the Leonardo paintings known to survive.

A team of archaeologists from the University of Birmingham have discovered new evidence of huge mass graves on the former site of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka.

Since the Nazis razed the camp in November of 1943 after a prisoner revolt, leaving little visible evidence of the 800,000+ Jews they’d slaughtered in just over a year of operation, Holocaust deniers have claimed that Treblinka wasn’t a death camp at all, but rather a transit station where prisoners were sorted before being shipped off to other labor camps. (Interestingly, that’s just what the SS told new arrivals before making them undress and sending them to the “showers” for “delousing.”)

This is the first coordinated scientific attempt to locate graves at Treblinka. Led by forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls, the research team used ground-penetrating radar and aerial and satellite imagery to look for burial sites without breaking ground, out of respect for Jewish Halacha law which forbids disturbing burial sites.

Sturdy Colls said: “All the history books state that Treblinka was destroyed by the Nazis but the survey has demonstrated that simply isn’t the case.”

She added: “I’ve identified a number of buried pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable in size, and very deep, one in particular is 26 by 17 metres.”

Dug by an enormous excavator from the quarry at the nearby Treblinka I forced labour camp, each of these large pits are thought to contain the charred remains of thousands of bodies. Some of the pits were used for burial, others as cremation pits. In March 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the camp and ordered that all the bodies be cremated. The burial pits were opened and the corpses burned on cremation grates built out of railway tracks. There are pictures extant of the resulting ash heaps.

BBC Radio 4 will air a program following the Colls’ work at Treblinka. The Hidden Graves of the Holocaust first airs on Monday, January 23 at 8:00 PM.

A more personal witness to the horrors of the Holocaust can be found in a remarkable book recently published by the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum: The Sketchbook from Auschwitz. In 1947, Józef Odi, a former prisoner who was working as a watchman on the Auschwitz grounds, found 32 sketches on 22 pages rolled into a bottle and hidden in the foundations of a barracks near the gas chambers and crematoria.

These incredible works of art, beautiful and horrifying in equal measure, are the only drawings made in Birkenau to depict the extermination of Jews. They are signed with the initials MM, so we don’t even know the name of the artist. We know from some of the depictions that they were made in 1943 and that the artist was immensely courageous to make these detailed drawings recording the systematic mass-murder of Jews, including badge numbers of functionary prisoners, license plates of trucks and train cars.

This is the first time all of the MM sketches have been published.

Amidst thousands of drawings of mechanical inventions, artillery, anatomy, the natural world, etc. made by Leonardo da Vinci and collected in the Codex Atlanticus are some fragments of a design that nobody paid much attention to for 500 years. In 1978, Da Vinci scholar Carlo Pedretti paid attention and identified the drawing as a handbag designed by Leonardo da Vinci around 1497.

Agnese Sabato and Alessandro Vezzosi of the Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci in Vinci recently reassembled the design from the fragments. Vezzosi thinks Leonardo made several drawings of the same bag but they’ve been lost.

As a tribute to the city of Florence, a city that has long been famous for its exquisite leather work, fashion house Gherardini has brought Leonardo’s handbag to life. Designer Carla Braccialini designed the “Pretiosa” (meaning “precious” and yes, I am saying it like Gollum) bag based on Leonardo’s drawing, and artisans made it by hand using luxury materials like embroidered calf leather and an embossed brass handle.

Here is an all too short video of a craftsman making the “Pretiosa”:

Functional and beautiful, creative and provocative, the bag would have certainly stood out among Renaissance fashion.

“While the shape recalls the lectern in “The Annunciation,” painted by Leonardo in the workshop of Verrocchio, its patterns feature rotating spirals and floral motifs, scrolls and foliage in metamorphosis,” Vezzosi said.

Boasting a unique closing system, the bag was designed at the end of Leonardo’s first Milanese period, around 1497. At that time, the artist was painting the tapestries in the Last Supper and knots designs in the Sala delle Asse in the Castello Sforzesco.

“Pretiosa” was on display for just three days (January 11-13) at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, the first art school in Europe which was founded by Cosimo I de’ Medici and Giorgio Vasari in 1563. Gherardini has made only 99 Preciouses. They will theoretically be sold in Gherardini boutiques starting in March, but I highly doubt anybody walking in off the street will be able to get their mitts on one.

This wasn’t Leonardo’s only foray into fashion design. Several of his forays into clothing and accessory design have survived, as have his writings on the subject. He had strong opinions on the fashions of his era, condemning excessive ornamentation, overly tight clothes and shoes.

An appreciation for fashion is not Gherardini’s sole connection to the Renaissance genius. Lisa Gherardini, born to a decayed aristocratic Florentine family in 1479, married successful silk merchant Francesco Del Giocondo when she was 15. In 1503, Francesco commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a portrait of her. It took him so long to paint it that he officially gave up the commission in 1506, although he kept working on it for the rest of his life.

After his death in 1519, the painting was bought by King Francis I of France. Now Leonardo’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini, aka la Gioconda, aka Madonna Lisa, aka Monna Lisa, aka the Mona Lisa, smiles serenely at dense crowds of Louvre visitors. One hundred and twenty-six years ago, her relatives founded the Gherardini fashion house.

Two letters that are thought to have passed through the hands of Scottish national hero William Wallace will go on display this August at the Scottish Parliament as part of its annual Festival of Politics. These are the only two surviving documents that are directly connected to Wallace and neither of them is actually owned by Scotland, so to see them both together in the motherland is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

One letter, known as the Safe Conduct or the Wallace Letter, was written on November 7th, 1300 by King Philip IV of France to his representatives in Rome. Wallace had left Scotland for France in the fall of 1298 after his defeat at the Battle of Falkirk and his resignation as Guardian of Scotland in favour of Robert the Bruce. Written in Latin, the letter commands that the King’s ambassadors ask Pope Boniface VIII to agree to Wallace’s requests.

Here’s a translation of the letter:

Philip by the grace of God, king of the French, to his beloved and loyal people appointed at the Roman Court, greetings and favour. We command you that you ask the Supreme Pontiff to consider with favour our beloved William le Walois of Scotland, knight, with regard to those things which concern him that he has to expedite. Dated at Pierrefonds on the Monday after the feast of All Saints [7 November 1300]. [Endorsed]: Fourth letter of the King of France.

So it’s not really a safe conduct so much as a King asking a third party to support his ally. The reason it’s called the Safe Conduct is that English records note that Wallace was carrying three safe conducts when he was arrested, one from the King of France, one from the King of Norway and one from the King of Scotland. It was last referred to in an inventory of English records in 1323, then faded in the mists of time until the letter was discovered in the Tower of London in 1820.

We can’t know with certainty that this document is the French safe conduct taken from William Wallace after his arrest. It could have been intercepted by spies, for instance. However, the letter does indicate that Wallace was going to appeal to the Pope in person so it makes sense that he would have carried it on him rather than Philip sending it directly, and given that it was found in the Tower, it makes sense that it was confiscated from one the Tower’s most famous residents.

The second letter is known as the Lübeck Letter and is the only surviving document we have that was written by William Wallace himself. Attached to this letter is also the only surviving example of Wallace’s personal seal. It has a Scottish Lion rampant on the front and a strung bow with arrow on the reverse.

After Scottish forces led by William Wallace and his northern ally Andrew de Mornay (aka Andrew Murray) won the Battle of Stirling Bridge on September 11, 1297, Wallace wasted no time trying to get the Scottish economy back on track. The British had captured Scottish ports the year before and severely curtailed trade. Exactly a month after Stirling Bridge, Wallace felt secure enough to write to the Hanseatic League towns of Hamburg and Lübeck alerting them that Scotland’s ports were open for business again. (Mornay was mortally wounded at Stirling Bridge, although it appears he lived for a short time afterwards and Wallace continued to include his name in correspondence until his death.)

Andrew Moray and William Wallace, leaders of the army of the Kingdom of Scotland and the Community, to their worthy and beloved friends, the Mayors and citizens of Lübeck and Hamburg, greeting. We have been told by trustworthy merchants of the Kingdom of Scotland that you are giving help and favour in all business concerning us and our merchants for which we thank you. We ask that it be made known among your merchants that they will now have safe access to all ports in the Kingdom of Scotland, since Scotland, blessed be God, has been rescued from the power of the English by force of arms. Given at Haddington in Scotland, on the 11th day of October in the year of grace one thousand two hundred and ninety seven.

The Hamburg letter was destroyed in World War II. The Lübeck Letter survived secreted away in a Hanseatic League archive in a Lübeck museum. It is now kept in the National Archives of Lübeck who have loaned it to Scotland for the exhibit.

The Scottish government has long yearned for both letters. Members of Parliament have requested that the National Archives in Kew and Lübeck donate the letters to Scotland. That hasn’t happened, although Kew has agreed to a long-term loan of the Safe Conduct letter. Since both documents are extremely fragile, they will be exhibited for a short time only. The exhibition is free and will be open from August 10 to August 31, 2012 in the Scottish Parliament Building’s Main Hall.