Category: Museums

Catherine de’ Medici returns to Strawberry Hill House

Modern(ish), Museums

A portrait of Catherine de’ Medici with four of her children has returned to Strawberry Hill House 279 after Horace Walpole first bought it and 179 years after it was sold away with the rest of his vast collection. It is the only surviving contemporary portrait of Catherine de’ Medici, one of the most powerful queens in French history. It was acquired from its private owners as part of the Acceptance in Lieu scheme that allows donation of important items of cultural patrimony to pay off a tax bill. In this case the portrait has been accepted in lieu of of £1 million in taxes.

It was painted in 1561 by the workshop of Francois Clouet and depicts Catherine with her arm around her eldest surviving son 10-year-old Charles, who was then technically King Charles IX although Catherine ruled as his regent. His younger brother Henry, then Duke of Angoulême and Duke of Orléans, who would succeed Charles as monarch of France in 1574, stands to his right. Between them is their sister, Margaret, the future queen consort of Navarre who would become queen of France when her husband Henry III of Navarre became Henry IV of France. She was eight years old when this portrait was painted. In the bottom left is six-year-old Francis, Francis, Duke of Alençon and Anjou.

Dr Silvia Davoli, the curator at Strawberry Hill House, said Catherine’s gestures are highly symbolic, as she simultaneously presents the young monarch and protectively keeps him close to her, reflecting the substantial influence she held over the political life of France and the control and guidance she exercised over her son’s rule. It also shows the bond between members of the family – they are close and look alike.

It’s not known how such an important royal portrait found its way to England. Walpole, who was a huge Medici fanboy and once considered writing a history of the family, bought it for £25 from Hertfordshire county MP Thomas Plumer Byde. The Byde family had connections to the French monarchy that could be a possible explanation for how the portrait crossed the Channel. Thomas’ grandfather was paid 300 guineas by Louis XIV to oppose a separate peace between England and the Dutch republic that would end the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667). Maybe the Bourbon Louis threw in a portrait of the last Valois kings and their mum to sweeten the pot.

We don’t know exactly when Walpole first installed the painting in his Gothic Revival mansion in Twickenham, London, but it appears in the 1774 inventory of the Strawberry Hill collection. At that time it was hanging in the west end of the first floor Gallery, the same room where the Giambologna ostrich strutted its stuff. The portrait suffered the same fate as the ostrich: it was sold by Horace Walpole’s wastrel great-nephew in his everything-must-go firesale of the contents of Strawberry Hill, art collection to doorknobs, in April 1842.

The monumental portrait has only been seen in public three times in the past 126 years, most recently at a Strawberry Hill exhibition at the V&A in 2010. It will now be on permanent public display in the Gallery at Strawberry Hill House which reopens to visitors on May 17th. Dr. Davoli again:

“The acquisition of this unique portrait of Catherine de’ Medici with her Children is important not just for its great intrinsic value and meaning, but also because it gives us, at Strawberry Hill House, the possibility to reconstruct one of the many historical narratives that were at the basis of Walpole’s collecting strategies. This portrait speaks to us of Walpole’s interest in the Italian and French Renaissance, its protagonists and great art.”

Unframed Botticelli reveals original paint

Multimedia, Museums, Renaissance

The removal of the frame encasing Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi’s Adoration of the Kings in London’s National Gallery has revealed original paint, giving conservators a rich source of information to restore the tempera-on-wood masterpiece. The work has suffered hardships in the six centuries since it was painted, some accidental (water damage), some blunderous (drastic overcleaning). It was bought by The National Gallery in 1857, and it was so brutally “restored” that many details were lost.

In order to conserve it by modern standards, the National Gallery team first took X-rays which showed that the painting continued underneath the top of the frame. When restorer Jill Dunkerton and conservator Britta New removed it from its frame, they found that while very dirty, the paint underneath was in excellent condition compared to the main part of the composition which was sadly flattened by the terrible 19th century cleaning. The unframing also made new sense of the proportions of the figures and their grouping in three levels. The bottom of the frame had hidden a step and made the figures on the left and center look like they were different sizes for no reason.

The painting’s dimensions — 20 inches high and 54 inches wide — suggest that it may have originally been designed to fit a piece of furniture, so it’s unclear when it was first framed. The one that was removed dates to the 19th century when framers in Florence created a custom-carved frame that would accommodate the concave warp the long panel had developed by then.

Here’s a video of the frame being removed piece by piece:

It was painted around 1470, early in the careers of Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. Botticelli had just struck out on his own after working as an apprentice in the studio of Fra Filippo Lippi, Filippino’s natural father, who had died the year before. Filippino completed his apprenticeship in Botticelli’s new workshop and was listed as his sole assistant in the guild records of 1472. In an unusual twist, The Adoration of the Kings was started by Filippino and then completed by Sandro. Generally apprentices completed the works of the masters, not the other way around. Botticelli is likely responsible for the crowd of kings, horses and onlookers on the left, the dwarf and the man gazing upwards in the central section and the shepherds on the right; Filippino’s hand is evident in the Virgin and Child, the kneeling king kissing Christ’s foot and the entourage behind him.

The distant town, lake and rocks in the center background were copied from Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata by Jan van Eyck, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Early Northern Renaissance art was much in fashion in Florence at the time, and drawings of important works made their way south where Florentine artists used versions of them in their own designs.

Botticelli and Lippi’s northern inspiration gave Jill Dunkerton a unique window into what the original would have looked like before the scrubbing. She was able to study Van Eyck’s piece to recreate some of the lost detail, and the results of her retouching are pretty spectacular so far. Check out this video of her at work. The before and after of the rocks is a particularly striking contrast.

Constantine colossus reunited with finger

Ancient, Museums

The bronze colossus of Constantine in Rome’s Capitoline Museums has been reunited with his long-lost finger. The missing piece is a section 15 inches long comprising the top two phalanges of the left index finger. It was rediscovered in the collection of the Louvre in 2018 by Aurélia Azéma, a doctoral student researching ancient welding techniques used to create large-scale bronze statues. It had been mistakenly catalogued as a Roman toe, but Azéma realized it was a finger and calculated from its dimensions that it would fit a statue 40 feet in height. That’s a very short list, and the bronze Constantine, along with its marble acrolith counterpart also in the Capitoline Museums, are the only surviving pieces of ancient statues that size.

The colossus in its current form dates to the early 4th century (the head may originally have been cast as far back as the 1st century and then been recarved to depict subsequent emperors with Constantine as the last). Nothing is known about its fate in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It emerges again in the 12th century, part of the papal collection. The head, the hand, a partial forearm and a sphere topped with a pointed spine, were installed in the courtyard of the Lateran

The head was described as bearing a gilded crown, now lost, although significant traces of gilding survive on the extant fragments of the bronze. The globe was held in the giant hand, a symbol of imperial power, and a small statue, perhaps of victory is believed to have been mounted atop the spine. The sphere was still in the hand as late as 1465. The group was donated to the People of Rome in 1471 by avid patron of the arts and collector of antiquities Pope Sixtus IV, but sometime between then and the 1584, the sphere was detached from the hand and mounted on the first milestone of the Appian Way.

A part of the palm is missing from when the sphere was detached. It’s likely the index finger was amputated around this time as well, as descriptions written shortly after the unfortunate operation note the upper two phalanges missing from the index finger. There are no documentary records of it entering the Roman antiques market at this time, but someone took it out of circulation around this time.

The finger fragment disappears from the historical record until the 19th century. It pops up in France in 1863, part of a large acquisition by the Louvre Museum of pieces from the collection of Roman banker Marquis Giampietro Campana who amassed one of the century’s greatest collections of Roman and Greek antiquities.

When Azéma recognized it as a finger and proposed it might have been Constantine’s, an exact replica was cast out of fiberglass. The fiberglass finger was sent to Rome where conservators tested it on the bronze hand. It was a perfect fit. Now, exactly 550 years after the Sistine donation and 500 years after it was disarticulated, the finger has been reattached to the hand and is on display in the Exedra of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoline Museums.

Wax bust of Flora definitely not by Leonardo

Modern(ish), Museums

A wax bust whose attribution to Leonardo da Vinci once caused art historians to threaten violence has been conclusively shown to be a modern work from the 18th century at the earliest.

The bust of Flora, goddess of flowers and springtime, now in the National Museums in Berlin was spotted by general director of the Royal Museum of Berlin Wilhelm von Bode in an antique store in London in 1907. Her downcast eyes, half-smile and finely-modeled features impressed Bode as a work by Leonardo da Vinci. German art historian Max Friedländer, assistant director of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum under Bode, was convinced by its high quality and wear patterns that it was a Renaissance work. Bode bought it for a princely sum (185,000 Goldmark) in 1909 and announced with much fanfare that it was a work by no less a Renaissance luminary than Leonardo da Vinci, the only known wax sculpture surviving from the period.

Bode was held in high regard in Germany. He had been involved in the creation of a national collection for the royal museums since he was hired as assistant curator of sculpture in 1872 and his career would span the entire five decades of the second German Empire from Unification to Republic. Driven to make Berlin a capital of the arts on the same level with Paris, Vienna, London, St. Petersburg and Rome, he had often been in competition against his counterparts in developing the great public collections of Europe, including a long-standing bitter dispute with Giovanni Morelli, an eminent Italian scholar, parliamentarian and strong advocate against the sale of Italy’s cultural patrimony to deep-pocketed foreign museums, on attribution methodology.

The acquisition of Flora was seen as a huge coup for Germany’s cultural institutions. The bust had been snatched out from under Britain’s nose and now Germany had a unique work of the world’s most famous and least prolific Old Master. The braggadocio was immediately met with pushback. Within months, the Times published a story contesting the attribution and alleging Flora was in fact it was created by 19th century British sculptor and photographer Richard Cockle Lucas who had copied it in 1860 from a painting of Flora in the Hermitage once attributed to Leonardo but later determined to be the work of his student and right-hand-man Francesco Melzi. Lucas’ son Albert Dürer Lucas, then 80 years old, swore that his father had made it and that Albert had helped stuff old newspapers and wood chips into the hollow of the bust.

Even though newspapers and wood chips were indeed found inside, including an article from 1840, Bode dismissed out of hand the possibility that Lucas was the sculptor. Lucas, Bode contended, was simply not good enough to model so superlative a piece. Unlike Flora, Lucas’ known wax pieces were greyish in color, lacked any polychromy and still smelled of wax. Bode was sure that at most, Lucas had been employed to fill its empty core to reinforce the structure and had fashioned some arms to match.

In the next two years, more than 730 heated articles were written debating the attribution. There were debates on the floor of the Prussian parliament. Two scholars challenged each other to a duel. Bode died in 1929, still convinced that his attribution to Leonardo was correct. The debate got less aggressive over the decades, but never died down. Even modern technology hasn’t been able to settle the issue conclusively, because wax, as it happens, is a complicated medium to date.

Albert Dürer Lucas said his father made the bust by melting down a bunch of burned candle ends. Analysis of wax samples found it is composed almost entirely of spermaceti, a waxy substance produced in the head cavity of the sperm whale commonly used in 19th century candles, and a small amount of beeswax. The decay of C14 occurs in the atmosphere in a calculable way, but under water the C14 is absorbed much more slowly and is much older than the carbon absorbed on land. The Marine Reservoir Effect makes radiocarbon dating results difficult to calibrate because you would need to know that specific whale’s full biography — track it movements from equator to ice shelves — to produce any semblance of accurate results.

An attempt to radiocarbon date Flora in the 1980s was able to exclude the Renaissance period, but the results were not reliable as the marine calibration issue remained thorny. The new study utilized two calibration curves, marine and terrestrial, and applied them to samples of the wax from Flora as well as to another work by Lucas, an 1850 relief of Leda and the Swan. The result was a date range of between 1704 and 1950, admittedly wide, but it conclusively precludes that the bust was made by Leonardo or anyone else in the Renaissance.

The study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports and can be read here.

Medieval aphrodisiacs, humors, fasting and a really old callback

Medieval, Multimedia, Museums

More than 11 years ago when this blog was new (well… less old, at any rate), I wrote about medieval penitentials and the brilliant sex flowchart derived therefrom by University of Kansas history professor emeritus James A. Brundage for his seminal text Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. It is still one of the most viewed posts in History Blog history.

Written by Irish monks starting in the 6th century, penitentials listed sins commonly encountered in confession and suggested suitable penances for each sin. They are remarkably explicit and specific in their descriptions of sinful sex acts, and the penances consistently prescribe rigorous fasting. A wide variety of sexual experiences — same-sex, extra-marital, marital but done at the wrong time, beastiality, masturbation — all earned the penitents years of fasting.

There was some discussion in the comments of what that level of fasting might entail. One comment from Mary clarified that a fasting penance in this context enjoined penitent sinners to abstain from certain kinds of food, not all food, mostly rich foods like meat and wine.

I was reminded of this exchange when watching the highly entertaining and illuminating webinar Love, Lust, and Libido: Aphrodisiacs in Medieval Europe hosted by food historian Ken Albala and Getty manuscripts curator Larisa Grollemond. Albala explanes the Humor Theory and how inextricably linked it was to food which was not just a menu but medicine. What foods you were allowed to eat while doing penance for sexual sins was determined by the humors, because some ingredients — ginger, meat, salt — stimulated libido/performance/fertility while others — spinach, beans, fruit — suppressed them. Grollemond adds some visual aids in the form of manuscript illuminations from the Getty’s collection. It is an impressively thorough and eminently watchable treatment of the question.

Also not to be missed are three videos of Albala making recipes mentioned in the webinar. That almond milk creamed spinach from 1420 looks pretty great to me, especially if you add the garlic the author warned against as it is known to inflame lust.