The History Blog

This is the last week of the British Museum’s exhibition of its impressive collection of etchings by Hercules Segers. Hercuwho, you might well ask, as did I when I first encountered him on the British Museum website. Short answer: Hercules Pieterszoon Segers (ca. 1589 – ca. 1638) was an incredibly innovative Dutch printmaker and painter during the Golden Age of Dutch art. He experimented with printing media in such radical ways that he was centuries ahead of his time. His imaginary landscapes of craggy mountains and desolate valleys printed on colored paper in colored ink look like something J.M.W. Turner might have painted two hundred years later, or rather, like texturized, color-washed, inverted negatives of something Turner might have painted two hundred years later.

Segers’ prints still look incredibly fresh, possibly because they’ve been so seldom seen since his popularity ebbed shortly after his death around 1638. He was better known by his contemporaries for his paintings which were collected by Dutch masters Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan van de Cappelle. Rembrandt was a particular fan. Only a dozen of Segers’ paintings are known today, and Rembrandt owned eight of them.

Rembrandt also collected Segers’ prints, which inspired his own far more famous etchings. One of Rembrandt’s etchings, in fact, was more than inspired by Segers’ work; it was built on it. Rembrandt acquired one of Segers’ original copper plates, Tobias and the Angel, and reworked the figures into a Flight into Egypt. He made small changes to the landscape (mainly the copse of trees behind the Holy Family), but kept much of it the same, because the greatest of the Dutch Golden Age painters knew that there was no improving on the original.

There are only 183 of Segers’ known prints extant, made from 54 original plates. Unlike Rembrandt, Dürer, Goya and every other printmaker you can name, Segers never made large print runs, and every single impression is different. Some of them are vastly different. He used colored ink printed on paper he dyed himself, sometimes running the paper and plate through the press with fabric to apply texture to the print. Sometimes he printed directly onto fabric. Once the print was pressed, he would hand-paint different details on each piece and often dipped the finished composition in a tint. Nobody else did this. He also experimented with different crops and cuttings, bringing a whole new focus to individual prints.

The results are so unprintlike that art historians have dubbed them “printed paintings,” and indeed his actual paintings are so small that they are about the same size as his large prints, so he blurred the demarcation line between print and paint in more ways than one.

He utilized existing printmaking techniques in new and startling ways, but he also broke entirely new ground. From the British Museum pdf about Segers:

His greatest invention was undoubtedly the process of lift-ground etching (also known as sugar-lift or sugar-bite etching, sugar aquatint or pen method). Although no accounts by Segers of his working methods have survived, it is assumed that he used a sugar solution to draw a composition on a copper-plate either with a pen or even with a brush, as some of the lines are quite broad. The plate was then probably covered with a thin, resinous ground and bathed in hot water which made the sugar granules swell causing the ground to blister off where the design had been applied. The plate would then have been treated as usual: the exposed copper-plate bitten in an acid bath, inked and subsequently printed. The resulting lines have a granulated surface, similar to aquatint which was a later invention. This technique, allowing the artist to apply defined lines with a brush, was not practiced again until the 18th century.

I checked my copy of H.W. Janson’s classic reference tome History of Art (mine is the Fifth Edition published in 1995) and Segers is not even mentioned in passing in the entire 1000 pages. Alexander Cozens, on the other hand, a fairly conventional British landscape watercolorist and printmaker who gets the credit for inventing aquatint over a century after Segers’ related invention, has six pages in the index.

Segers’ genius began to get recognition again in the 19th century, when major purchases by the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum (click links for pictures of the museums’ Segers collections) put his work before a broader audience. Even so, the current exhibition at the British Museum is the first time all of their Segers etchings have been put on display as a group, and most of them have never been on display at all. If you’re in London, get thee to the BM stat.

Moctezuma’s headdress is a large and elaborate 16th century crown which according to legend once belonged to Aztec emperor Moctezuma II, made from the iridescent green tail feathers of the Resplendent Quetzal. Moctezuma either gave it to Hernán Cortés as a gift upon his arrival at Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire and modern day Mexico City, or it was pillaged by Cortés’ forces after the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521.

There is no record of where it was taken, nor is there any evidence that it belonged to Moctezuma. We don’t even know for sure that it’s a headdress. It doesn’t match any of the headdresses depicted in contemporary accounts. In the 19th century the assumption was that it was a mantle, and recent scholarship suggests they might have been right about it being a mantle, but that it was worn by a priest to ritually transform him into the incarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, rather than by the king.

What we do know is that by 1575 it was in the extensive private collection of Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria, at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck. Ferdinand was the nephew of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who was also King of Spain during the Conquista. He could easily have gotten his hands on the headdress via his family connections.

It remained in the castle until the early 19th century when Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology was entrusted with most of the Castle Ambras collection. The headdress was the subject of much anthropological fascination from then on, including from Zelia Nuttall, the American archaeologist, anthropologist and expert in pre-Columbian Mexico who in 1890 first identified it as an Aztec “quetzalapanecayotl” or a featherwork crown.

The piece is 46 inches high at the peak and 69 inches wide. In addition to the 400 dramatic quetzal tail feathers that adorn the outer layer, there are rows of blue Lovely Cotinga feathers, pink flamingo feathers, smaller quetzal feathers and white and red feathers from the squirrel cuckoo. The inner rings are studded with gold and gemstones. The Aztecs venerated the Resplendent Quetzal as the god of the air, a symbol of rebirth and of freedom.

Given its beauty, historical significance and powerful symbolism, it’s no surprise that the headdress has been the subject of a long-standing dispute between Mexico and Austria. There are no Aztec headdresses left in Mexico because the Spanish took them all — the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City only has a replica of Moctezuma’s headdress on display — so Mexico has been trying for decades to get this one back, even going so far as to petition the United Nations for its return, but to no avail.

In 2008, the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) entered into talks with the Austrian Government and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the parent institution of the Museum of Ethnology. They agreed first to do an extensive scientific analysis on the headdress to assess its condition and do any conservation necessary that will allow the piece to travel. In 2011, a tentative deal was struck: Mexico would officially recognize Austria’s uncontested ownership of the headdress, Austria would loan Mexico the headdress and in return Mexico would loan Austria the golden stagecoach of Maximilian I of Mexico, emperor of the Second Mexican Empire (1863-1867) and brother of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria.

There was still one major stumbling block, however. According to Mexican law, all pre-Columbian artifacts belong to the nation. Once they cross the border, no matter who else might lay claim to them, they become property of the state and cannot leave the country. No matter the terms of the loan agreement, Austria had no intention of letting the headdress into Mexico until the government’s assurances had the force of law.

A new bilateral cultural exchange agreement between Austria and Mexico that would resolve the issue has just been approved by the Mexican Senate and Austria’s cabinet. The Senate’s amendments to the cultural property law allow for long-term loans of artifacts while acknowledging the lender’s ownership rights. Austria’s legislature has to approve the deal, which is expected to happen within the next few months, and both parties need to sort out how to transport the fragile headdress without damaging it, but it looks like the biggest obstacle to the return of this glorious symbol of Mexican heritage might just have been overcome.

The Library of Congress’ online collections of historical images are some of my favorite time sinks. I found a new one this weekend that sucked up hours of browsing time and more hours of researching random tidbits discovered during the browse. It’s the Performing Arts Posters collection, 2114 publicity posters from live entertainment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of them are color lithographs or woodcuts that advertise all kinds of performances, from magic shows to splashy theatrical reenactments of historical events to operas.

If you have time to burn, I recommend you view all and arrow through the entire collection in alphabetical order. If you do not have eternities to while away, you could browse the three main collections that make up the whole: the Magic Poster Collection, the Minstrel Poster Collection, and the Theatrical Poster Collection, the last of which is subdivided according to genre (Burlesque, Specialty Acts, Vaudeville, etc.).

The Magic Poster Collection includes some prestidigitation masters who are still famous today, like Harry Houdini and Howard Thurston, but I have a soft spot for the more obscure acts. Sometimes it’s the little guy who has the best graphics. The Minstrel Poster Collection is, as the name suggests, chock full o’ racist caricatures. Those shows were popular for an incredibly long time. The oldest poster in the collection dates to 1847, the pre-Civil War heyday of white actors blackening their faces with burnt cork and acting like buffoons.

The troupe advertised in the poster, the New Orleans Ethiopian Serenaders (also known as Buckley’s Serenaders after troupe leader James Buckley), were touring England at the time where they were a notable success. Contrary to the standard song and dance style of minstrel shows, the New Orleans Ethiopian Serenaders’ 1847 performance at London’s Princess Theater kicked off with a burlesque version of the opera La Sonnambula by Vincenzo Bellini. This became something of a trademark for Buckley’s shows even when they returned to the United States and set up permanent shop in a theater on Broadway until it closed in 1862.

The Theatrical Poster Collection has the lion’s share of art works, over 1800 posters covering multiple genres of variety stage theater. Of course the Burlesque posters are good unclean fun, but some of the most spectacular graphics come from the Operetta category, especially the D’Oyly Carte’s Gilbert and Sullivan productions, and from the Kiralfy Brothers, a company that staged lavish spectaculars of Biblical stories, famous adventure stories, and quasi-historical re-enactments.

Here’s an interesting link that cropped up. Three of the posters in the Vaudeville category advertise a female impersonator known as Stuart, the Male Patti (1, 2, 3). I assumed Patti was another vaudeville performer of the wearing-little-more-than-a-corset-on-stage variety, but then in the Portrait Posters, posters advertising a single star performer, I came across one M. Sissieretta Jones, the Black Patti, “the greatest singer of her race.” A page later and what to my wondering eyes should appear but “the wonderful child singer & actress” Louise Marguerite, aka the Miniature Patti, who I think bears a striking resemblance to a Scarlett Johansson ca. The Horse Whisperer.

I discovered that Patti was not a Vaudeville performer, but rather a famous Italian coloratura soprano called Adelina Patti. She was something of a prodigy, debuting as Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in 1859 when she was just 16 years old. Two years later, she was invited to perform at Covent Garden in a non-burlesque version of La Sonnambula and was a smash hit. She continued to be a smash for decades, even though her voice changed and deepened as she aged. Verdi adored her, calling her the greatest singer who ever lived. In 1862, she performed the popular song “Home, Sweet Home” at the White House for President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd. They were moved to tears and asked her to sing it again. After that, the song became a signature piece for her.

By the time of the male (1898), Black (1899) and child (1894) Pattis, the original Patti was in her 50s singing at her mature peak, making thousands of dollars a night which she insisted be paid to her in gold before every performance. She retired from public performance in the early 1900s, but still put on the occasional private or charity concert. Her bags of gold and smart investments ensured that her retirement was a luxurious one. She died in 1919 and is buried at Paris’ Père Lachaise Cemetery.

I very much doubt the other Pattis were so fortunate. I couldn’t find out what happened to Stuart and Louise Marguerite, but Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones was a pioneer and a trailblazer. She’s probably the only one of the three who came by her moniker legitimately, since it was Adelina Patti’s manager who saw her perform in 1888 and suggested she take her soprano virtuosity on tour. In 1892 she was the first African American to sing at New York’s Music Hall (renamed Carnegie Hall a year later). That same year she sang at the White House for President Benjamin Harrison. She would sing for the next three presidents after him — Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt — and for the British royal family.

Despite her success as a soprano in Europe and the United States, she soon hit the segregation ceiling. When she found that the major opera houses like the Metropolitan would not hire a black artist, she formed a troupe of her own, the Black Patti Troubadours, and went on the road with a musical review that included vaudeville and minstrel acts as well as greatest hits of opera, not just arias but fully staged scenes. The troupe was a success for two decades and earned her a great deal of money.

She retired in 1915 at the age of 46 due to illness and to care for her sick mother in Providence, Rhode Island. The money she had made sadly did not last. Eventually she had to sell all her properties, her awards, and her trophies just to pay the bills. She was 74 and penniless when she died of cancer in 1933.

The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned, a new exhibit at Hampton Court Palace, dives lustily into the sensual decadence of the Restoration court under King Charles II. After 11 years of Puritan rule under Cromwell (and briefly his son), the return of the monarch ushered in an era of newly permissive social mores. Theaters reopened and for the first time in England, they were licensed to allow women to tread the boards instead of the young men in drag who used to play all the female roles.

Two of these new English actresses would become famous mistresses of Charles II. Their portraits are on display at the Hampton Court Palace show along with the portraits of Charles’ other major mistresses, together in one exhibit for the first time. In contrast to the formality of earlier court portraiture, these paintings are considerably more revealing. Nell Gwynne, one of the actresses Charles plucked from the theater and installed in mansions, posed nude as Venus in a less than modest pose. With her is her and King Charles’ illegitimate son Charles Beauclerk, who is portrayed as Cupid.

Themes explored in the exhibit are the association of beauty with virtue and how indulgence of the senses in pursuit of beauty could be justified as a spiritual pursuit; also featured are some of the shameless libertines who cut a swath through the ladies of the court.

On a lighter note of ribaldry, Hampton Court Palace has created a companion website called Ask Chiffinch on which William Chiffinch, Page of his Majesty’s Bed-Chamber and Keeper of the King’s Private Closet, aka the King’s “Pimpmaster General,” answers questions from the lovelorn in 17th century style. You have to be 16 or older to enter because there are photonovela-style pictures of sideboob and I suppose discussion of sexual topics, but it’s miles from explicit. You can submit your own dilemma using this form.

The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned runs until September 30th of this year. Here’s a brief introductory video:

This isn’t officially part of the exhibit, I don’t think, but it’s certainly in keeping with it. Hampton Court Palace offers evening Salacious Gossip Tours y’all. For £25, you get a glass of champagne and a ninety-minute guided tour of the nooks and crannies, metaphoric and literal, of the palace. Only people 18 and older are allowed in, which bodes very well.

From Charles II to George II, explore the tales of mistresses and gossip we dare not tell you during the day.

Our guides tell the risqué stories that are just too naughty for younger and more delicate ears, dealing with darker and more delicious themes.

This is a chance to experience the palace out of hours and those areas of history that have been overlooked by more traditional historians.

Somebody has to take that tour and tell us all about it.

Another sculpture that has been idling in a museum for ages is getting new attention all of a sudden. Egyptologist Giuseppina Capriotti of the Italian National Research Council believes a statue in the Cairo Museum depicts the twin children of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. The sandstone statue was discovered near the temple of Hathor in Dendera on the west bank of the Nile in 1918. Cleopatra VII is known to have commissioned works in that temple, most famously a monumental pharaonic relief of herself and her son by Julius Caesar, Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor Caesar, aka Cesarion.

The Cairo Museum bought the five-foot-tall statue but didn’t pay it a great deal of attention, thinking it a representation of the twin gods Shu and Tefnet, son and daughter of the sun god Atum-Ra.

The statue is of two nude children, one male, one female, who bear the attributes of sun and moon respectively. They have an arm over each other’s shoulders while they hold a serpent in their other hands. The coils of two snakes wind around their legs and the base of the statue.

Capriotti noticed that the boy has a sun-disc on his head,‭ ‬while the girl boasts a crescent and a lunar disc. The serpents, perhaps two cobras, would also be different forms of sun and moon, she said. Both discs are decorated with the udjat-eye, also called the eye of Horus, a common symbol in Egyptian art.

“Unfortunately the faces are not well preserved, but we can see that the boy has curly hair and a braid on the right side of the head, typical of Egyptian children. The girl’s hair is arranged in a way‬ similar to the so-called ‭m‬elonenfrisur‭ (‬melon coiffure) an elaborated hairstyle often associated with the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Cleopatra particularly,” said Capriotti.

The statue dates to between 50 and 30 B.C. Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s twins were born in 40 B.C. so the timing fits, but it’s the unusual iconographic choices which suggest this is not just a statue of Shu and Tefnet. In the Egyptian pantheon, Tefnet, the sister, wears the solar disk, but in this piece the female twin wears the crescent moon and the male wears the sun, in keeping with the Greek tradition of the female moon goddess Selene and the male incarnation of the sun, Helios.

The twins’ embrace could suggest a solar eclipse, which is significant because when Mark Antony officially recognized the twins as his children three years after their birth, the event was marked by a solar eclipse. That’s when Cleopatra changed their names from plain Cleopatra and Alexander to Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios.

If these are Antony and Cleopatra’s twins, it’s the first representation of the two together ever discovered. The only other image we have is of an adult Cleopatra Selene on coins minted during her reign as Queen of Mauretania. Alexander Helios does not appear to have survived into adulthood, nor his younger brother Ptolemy Philadelphus.

After their parents’ suicides, all three of Antony’s children by Cleopatra were taken to Rome by Octavian in 30 B.C. to march in his triumph as royal captives in gold chains. He handed the three of them over to his sister Octavia, Antony’s third wife, to raise. The boys disappear from the historical record, perhaps dead at Augustus’ hand, perhaps from natural causes. Cleopatra Selene, on the other hand, was married around 20 B.C. to King Juba of Mauretania, a north African client state.

By all accounts she was an accomplished and powerful ruler, working alongside her husband and maybe even bossing him around a little. It’s not often you see coins with the king on the one side and the queen on the other. She even named her son Ptolemy, in keeping with her mother’s tradition rather than the more common practice of naming sons after their fathers, or at least including some reference to the paternal line.

On February 10, 2008, three armed men wearing ski masks walked into the E.G. Buehrle Collection in Zurich, Switzerland. While one of them held staff and visitors at gunpoint, the other two helped themselves to four Impressionist masterpieces: Claude Monet’s Poppies near Vetheuil, Edgar Degas’ Count Lepic and his Daughters, Vincent Van Gogh’s Blossoming Chestnut Branches and Paul Cezanne’s The Boy in the Red Vest. It was one of the largest heists in Europe in terms of market value. The four paintings were worth an estimated $163.2 million.

Converting famous paintings into quick cash is rarely as easy as thieves imagine, however. The Van Gogh and Monet were found a week later in a car parked outside a Zurich psychiatric hospital. The remaining two disappeared without a trace.

Witnesses at the Zurich museum testified that the thieves spoke German with Slav accents. Two years ago, Serbia’s Anti-Organized Crime Unit, in collaboration with the police of several other European countries, opened an investigation into the theft. They uncovered a plan by four men to sell the Cezanne to a Serbian buyer for three million euros (about $4 million). The plan was thwarted when ringleader Ivan Pekovic was cornered in a parking lot after a high-speed chase through the streets of Belgrade.

The Cezanne was found in his car along with a cache of firearms and more than £1 million ($1.6 million) in cash. Police arrested two other men thought to be part of the ring, one in Belgrade and one in the southern town of Cacek.

A museum curator quoted by Serbia’s Blic newspaper said criminals smuggle artwork stolen in Western Europe through Serbia and on to Montenegro where they are then sold for cash to members of the Russian oligarchs eager to get their hands on a masterpiece.

Another network takes stolen art to Kosovo where thieves sell it to rich Albanians.

The recovered painting has been authenticated by a Swiss expert. It is indeed the missing Boy in the Red Vest, one of four slightly differing versions made by the Impressionist master. The other three are in museums in the United States.

That leaves only the Degas still to be found. According to this BBC article, Serbian interior minister Ivica Dacic said that the Degas had been found in 2009, but I’ve searched high and low and I can’t find anything about this in the 2009 press. You’d think it would have made just as much of a splash as the recovery of the other three have made.

Late at night on Thursday, April 5th, burglars broke through the brick wall of Durham University’s Oriental Museum, smashed two display cases and stole two Qing Dynasty artifacts worth a combined $3.2 million. That’s undervalued in terms of market pricing, I’m sure, because Chinese antiquities are breaking sales records left and right these days, and it’s undervalued in terms of historical and artistic significance. The museum considers the artifacts, high quality pieces from China’s last imperial dynasty, priceless.

The objects are an intricately carved, dark green jade bowl from 1769 and a Dehua porcelain figurine depicting seven fairies in a boat from the 17th century. The bowl has a poem engraved on the inside bottom. The figurine is covered inside and out in a milk-white glaze known as blanc de Chine that is characteristic of the Dehua area kilns. They are easily portable and highly desirable to unscrupulous collectors.

The senior investigating officer, Det Supt Adrian Green said he estimated the burglars had been in the premises for only a minute or two at the most once they forced entry.

“It seems very clear that this was a well-planned, highly organised break-in. They have spent around 40 minutes creating a hole in an outside wall and when it has been big enough, they have entered the gallery and made straight for these two items,” said Det Supt Green.

“I am sure this job has been planned for quite some time and I would think the artefacts have been stolen to order, for someone who has already identified a potential market.”

Alarms did go off, alerting museum security and the police, but the burglars were able to escape before the authorities got there.

Durham Police are pursuing the case with vigour. They are looking for any information people might have regarding the movements of a light blue Audi A3 and an orange Renault Megane. The cars were spotted in the area right before and after the crime. They’ve also arrested five people already on suspicion of assisting the thieves or conspiracy to commit burglary. The five suspects were interrogated and then released on bail, but police want one of them back. The authorities have released the pictures of two people they’re particularly keen on interviewing, Lee Paul Wildman (35) who was one of the five suspects detained earlier, and Adrian Mark Stanton (32).

Should you have any information about the burglary, suspects or cars, please call the Durham Constabulary at 0345 60 60 365 or Crimestoppers at 0800 555111. Sadly, the museum will be closed until further notice.

Alfons Mucha, the Czech artist who basically invented Art Nouveau (it was originally known as “Mucha Style”) and whose characteristic berobed women with flowing hair against a field of flowers have been selling everything from theatrical productions to champagne to chocolate since the late 19th century, rejected the Art Nouveau label, considering himself and his art first and foremost a product of the Slavic folk tradition in which he was raised. In 1900, he traveled all over the Balkans in preparation for his work on the Bosnia-Herzegovina pavilion for the Paris World’s Fair. Although he returned to Paris and continued his customary work, he was inspired by the trip to dedicate himself to “work for the [Czech] nation.”

Mucha was born in 1860 in Ivancice, a rural community in Moravia that was then part of the Austrian Empire. The area was a hotbed of Slavic nationalism, even more so in reaction to the Habsburg efforts to “Germanize” the many cultures in the empire. He left in 1879 to do design work for a theater in Vienna. He returned to Moravia after the theater burned down, doing some freelance art work including murals for Count Karl Khuen of Mikulov who would fund his first formal artistic education.

In 1887 he moved to Paris, studying and getting jobs as a commercial artist. He became famous in 1895 after a chance encounter in a print shop resulted in his making a poster for the play Gismonda, starring the incomparable Sarah Bernhardt. She loved the poster so much that she signed him to a six-year contract.

His fame spread worldwide, but back in his homeland he was considered something of a sell-out, more French than Slav. Although Mucha saw himself as Czech and his art as an expression of his Slavic identity, his countrymen tended to disagree. When he was commissioned to paint murals in the Mayor’s Office at the New Municipal House in Prague in 1909, the move was roundly criticized by the public.

Undeterred, in 1910 Mucha moved his family to Prague and, while still taking some commercial gigs to pay the bills, poured his talents and resources into the passion project of a lifetime: a series of 20 monumental paintings (the biggest canvas is 26 feet wide and 20 feet tall) depicting the history of the Slavic people. The Slav Epic took him 18 years to complete, during which time World War I saw the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of the new nation of Czechoslovakia with Prague as its capital.

On September 1, 1928, Alfons Mucha donated the complete Slav Epic to the people of Czechoslovakia. All 20 paintings went on display in the Trade Fair Palace in Prague where they inspired a range of reactions, many of them negative. The left-wing nationalists considered the style and pan-Slavic sentiments old-fashioned, and the fascists held Slavic nationalism itself in contempt.

When in 1939 Nazi Germany followed its occupation of the Sudetenland by invading the rest of Czechoslovakia, Mucha was one of the first artists to be arrested by the Gestapo. They released him, but he died shortly thereafter on July 14, 1939 of pneumonia. In his will, he bequeathed the Slav Epic to the city of Prague, on condition that they build a special pavilion to house them.

Building a pavilion for enormous Slav nationalist paintings wasn’t Prague’s top concern during World War II. Just keeping the paintings out of Nazi hands was challenge enough. The Slav Epic was rolled up and hidden in storage rooms (as well as, rumor has it, a crypt) to keep it safe. Unfortunately the end of the war wasn’t much help, as the Soviet-backed Communist Party which took power in the 1948 Czech coup had no love for the Epic. They certainly weren’t going to build a pavilion for it.

The paintings were moved to the southern Moravian town of Moravský Krumlov in 1950 for safekeeping but remained in storage. Finally in 1963 they went on display at the local castle. When the Communist regime fell in 1989, there was discussion about bringing the paintings back to Prague, since the artist did give them to the city, but the Moravský Krumlov community vehemently protested. The Mucha family sided with Moravský Krumlov, noting that legally Prague couldn’t claim the paintings without complying with the condition in Alfons’ will requiring a dedicated pavilion. They were concerned that moving the works only to put them up in some transitional space would be detrimental to their delicate health.

A decade of legal wrangling ensued, in the middle of which Prague approved plans for the construction of a new pavilion which was scheduled to be complete by 2010. Disputes over the proposed architecture of the pavilion kept it from ever getting built, but come 2010, Prague sent movers to the Moravský Krumlov castle anyway.

The Mucha family got an injunction to stop the move until they’ve built this everlovin’ pavilion like they’re supposed to, but five of the paintings made it out the door anyway, going on display in early 2011 at Prague’s Veletrzni Palace after restorers examined them. A year has passed and the legal issues remain unresolved, but over the protests of the Mucha family and the town of Moravský Krumlov, now Prague has taken the remaining 15 works.

The Veletrzni Palace is the only place with the wall space to display all 20 gigantic paintings, but its conditions are far from ideal. Temperature and humidity levels fluctuate enormously with the weather, and again, a temporary exhibit in an old building does not comply with the conditions stipulated by Alfons Mucha. The Mucha family and the foundation they run are working assiduously to create a permanent location for the Slav Epic in Prague’s central train station.

The Mucha Foundation says that Prague’s main railway station is the best permanent home for the paintings. [The artist's grandson] John Mucha says that the foundation is in negotiations with the council about the plans. “Everyone’s pulling in the same direction,” he says. “If we all manage to keep this momentum, the Slav Epic should be unveiled [there] in spring 2014.” When describing the suitability of the venue, John Mucha says that the train noise can be screened, and appropriately the art nouveau station was designed by Josef Fanta, a friend of Alphonse Mucha.

We’ll see if that ever happens. Meanwhile, the Epic will have to make do with the drafty, moist palace.

Johannes Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter has been thoroughly cleaned and restored, revealing new details about the original masterpiece and removing later interpolations. Woman in Blue was the first Vermeer the Rijksmuseum ever acquired. It was purchased from a London art dealer by Amsterdam banker Adriaan van der Hoop in 1839. He bequeathed it to the city of Amsterdam which put it on display at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts from 1854 to 1885, then loaned it to the Rijksmuseum where it has remained ever since.

Over the years, age, yellowed varnish, retouchings and other questionable conservation choices dimmed the glory of its sublime blues, but major projects to correct those issues are so expensive they’re usually reserved for works that have major condition problems that endanger the immediate health of the painting. Museums rarely have the funds to overhaul a painting just to make it look great again.

In 2010, the Rijksmuseum got its chance when Japan requested they allow Woman in Blue to tour the country, which would be the painting’s first trip to Asia. Japan offered to fund a full restoration of the painting before it left Amsterdam in return for the loan, and the Rijksmuseum accepted.

Conservator Ige Verslype, supervised by an international committee of experts, spent more than a year painstakingly restoring the piece, focusing on returning the picture as much as possible to its original condition. Before doing anything, he examined the work with the latest imaging technology (infrared reflectography and X-ray fluorescence scanning) and took five tiny paint samples from key places. He then removed most of the yellowed, cracked varnish, thus bringing the original color of the woman’s jacket back to vibrancy and unveiling the secret of Vermeer’s blue paint.

Ige Verslype: “The greatest surprise was when we discovered how Vermeer produced such an intense blue colour. We now know that he used a copper-green undercoat to give the colour extra depth. Once the yellowed glaze had been removed, this magnificent blue came back into view in all of its glorious nuances.”

Before the restoration, the dark blue on the back of her jacket that’s in shadow looked the same color as the blue velvet on the top of the chair. After the restoration, you can clearly see that they are different shades.

Next to go were the retouchings and overpaintings from previous restorations. In 1928, restorers mistook three white spots on the box or paper on the table in front of her as pearls. Vermeer used pearls in many of his paintings, and there were other pearls on the table in this painting. The restorers daubed some yellow on those white spots to make them noticeably pearls. This time around, conservators had scans to show that in fact those spots weren’t pearls, but simply white highlights. Verslype removed the yellow, returning the superfluous pearls to highlights.

Removing overpaint and varnish from the chairs showed them in a whole new light. You can see details of the upholstery that before were shrouded in darkness, like the edges of the velvet backing wrapped around the side. They also discovered a whole new row of brass nails on the side of the chair seat that had been completely covered in dark paint.

Once the restoration was complete, the Woman in Blue went on her first Asian tour, starting in June 2011 in Kyoto, then moving to the Miyagi Museum of Art in Sendai, and finally Tokyo’s Bunkamura Museum of Art. The tour ended on March 14, 2012, and the painting returned to the Rijksmuseum.

There it was put back on display on March 30, the first time Dutch audiences had a chance to see the restored work, and the first time in two years they got to see the painting at all. Along with the freshly blue Woman in Blue, four frames that have encased the painting over the years at the Rijksmuseum are also on display. The first one is a neo-rococo frame that was on the painting from when Adrian van der Hoop bought it all the way through the 1940s. Then it was reframed using a carved oak frame from around 1700. In the early 1960s, Woman in Blue was reframed again, this time in a gilded French Regency frame from ca. 1710. The last of the four was a modern ebony reproduction frame used starting in the 1990s.

None of them are quite right for the masterpiece. Conservators have taken the opportunity to study carefully what Vermeer preferred to use for frames. Ebony seems to be the consensus material, but the contemporary ebony-like frame, smooth and machine-tooled, flattens the look of the painting. The Rijksmuseum is looking for a simple ebony frame from the 17th century but hasn’t been successful yet. While the search is on, they’re using the gilded Regency frame.

When Google Art Project launched in January of last year, it gave anyone with a computer access to 17 major museums in nine countries including the US, France, Germany and the UK. The interface was on the clumsy side, unfortunately, making it hard to navigate, and although some stand-out individual pieces were presented in almost microscopic detail, the overall coverage was limited.

Now Google has announced the completion of the second version of Google Art Project. From 1,000 gigapixel ultra-high resolution images of paintings, the database now offers 32,000 images of not just paintings, but photographs, sculptures, textiles, rock art, ancient artifacts and so much more from 151 museums in 40 countries. If you’d like to take a turn through some of those museums and institutions, 46 of them have virtual tours, including the White House, Athens’ Acropolis Museum and the nearest and dearest to my heart, the Musei Capitolini on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.

The interface is vastly improved. You can navigate speedily from collection to collection. If you want to take a virtual tour of the museum, click the yellow man icon in the upper left next to the museum name and the Details button, then navigate just as you would use Street View in Google Maps. If you’d like to browse the artworks instead, just click on the thumbnails in the collection gallery. Click the details button for more information about the piece, including a link to the artwork on the website of the museum. Of course you can also search for individual artworks or artists using the menu in the top left.

They also have a much more user-friendly personal gallery where you can not only save the images in a collection of your own, but also make notes and share them with friends. If you’re in the mood to be surprised, click the Discover button on the left vertical menu (it looks like a light bulb) and Google Art Project will take you on a random tour of its wonders. You can browse it as a gallery or view as a slideshow.

The educational resources are greatly enhanced. Click on the Education link on the menu at the bottom of the screen to get an art historical overview in the Introduction and Look Like an Expert sections. The DIY section offers tips and ideas for ways to use Google Art Project as an educational and creative resource, to create a virtual exhibition of your own unbounded by geographical and financial limits. DIY even connects to 10 other museums’ own proprietary educational databases, like the Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History which I dearly love and have spent many lost weekends perusing.

The Google Art Project YouTube channel has introductory videos about using the site, about the artists and the museums. Here is a trippy preview of some of the incredible museum views and gigapixel artworks:

Here is the Google Street View camera as it records 360 degree views of every public room in the White House: