The History Blog

If you, like me, find artifacts from the early Atomic Era fascinating, there’s an incredible wealth of material for you to peruse online at the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection. The ORAU foundation has preserved a vast range of artifacts relating to the history of radiation, from the first issue of Le Radium (1904), the first scientific journal dedicated to radiation edited by Pierre Curie’s assistant Jacques Danne, to a Hot Wheels toy of Homer Simpson’s nuclear waste truck (early 1990s).

That entire collection is held at the Professional Training Programs (PTP) training facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Browsing the rich content they’ve digitized is a lot easier than touring that facility, I’m sure. My favorite sections are the posters, specifically the Atomic Movie Posters and the Health Physics Posters. The former are luridly awesome, and the latter are bizarrely childish considering that “Health Physics” was the vague term coined for proper radiation protection procedures.

The phrase was only four years old in 1947 when the posters were made. It seems to be still in use today even though I’ve never encountered it outside the confines of old posters. As always with these early Atomic artifacts, the remedies suggested seem … understated, much like putting troops in foxholes a few miles away from ground zero in an atomic bomb test at the Nevada Proving Grounds then marching them towards the mushroom cloud after the flash.

Footage of the Desert Rock exercises was used in civil defense videos throughout the 50s. Those videos make a point of emphasizing security protocols — mainly Geiger counters assessing when an area’s radiation levels were deemed “safe” — to protect the people involved in these tests, but at the same time they want to convey the survivability of an atomic blast. This video from the Federal Civil Defense Administration is called “Let’s Face It” and judging from the guy facing a faceful of shockwave in the face at 10:15, I fear they might mean it literally.

You can see the setup for a Desert Rock atomic test starting at the 6:30 point. It’s interesting to see the raw video and how that kind of footage was then used for public consumption.

Here is a thing that is a big deal: the Terracotta Army, clay statues made in the 3rd century B.C. for the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China. Here is another thing that is a big deal: the Kouros statues, free-standing sculptures in the round that first appear in the archaic period of Greece in the 7th century B.C. Here is something that should be a big deal but that I have literally never heard of until today: a group of approximately 33 life-size warriors carved free-standing in the round from solid stone by the Nuragic civilization of Sardinia sometime between 1000 and 800 B.C.

This is the only group of life-sized warriors ever found in Europe, and in a freakish coincidence, the first pieces of them were discovered in March 1974, the same month and year as the first Terracotta Army figures were discovered. They were found in an ancient necropolis near Cabras, western Sardegna, broken into thousands of pieces. A handful of ceramic fragments in the group were radiocarbon-dated to around the 9th century B.C.

Archaeological excavations in the area over the next few years recovered even more fragments. The eventual total was 5172 pieces of stone warriors, among them 15 heads and 21 torsos. Ten fragments from two statues were put back together and displayed, but the rest of the pieces languished uncleaned and unexamined for the next 30 years or so, until 2004 when archaeologists and conservators began a program of restoration at the Sassari Center for Conservation and Restoration. Researchers carefully cleaned the pieces and re-assembled the warriors using supports rather than trying to glue the bits together with modern plaster and stone to make them look like they did when new.

Twenty-five of the warriors are now intact once again and will go on display starting this summer at the Cagliari Museum in southern Sardinia. There are three different types of fighters represented: 16 “boxers,” bearing shields over their heads, six archers and six other warriors, accessorized with bows, shields, swords, chest armour and horned helmets.

Also re-assembled from the fragments are 13 models of nuraghe, massive conical stone castles built by the Nuragic culture starting in 1500 B.C. These are the oldest castles in Europe. Tens of thousands of them used to dot the island, but time, stone reuse and many invasions by successive waves of Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Moors, Spaniards and finally Italians have reduced their numbers to a mere 7000 today. That’s pretty damn sturdy construction considering that no mortar was involved.

It was the Carthaginians who probably destroyed the stone army during their conquest of the island in the 6th century B.C. The piles of fragments indicate intentional destruction, and since the stone warriors and model castles guarded the tombs of two generations of a single extended family, their destruction would have been a powerful symbol that there was a new boss in town.

I’m waiting to hear the ancient aliens theory, because I’ll be damned if those warriors’ faces don’t look exactly like C-3PO.

It has the name of a Prince song but the content comes straight from Queen Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s journals and letters. Victoria 4 Albert is an animated series in five parts that tells the story of Victoria’s and Albert’s relationship in glorious stop-motion puppetry, cut-out/collage animation, traditional drawn animation and shadow puppets. The script was written using excerpts from Victoria’s journals and Albert’s correspondence which gives the production a genuinely intimate feel.

The four-minute episodes depict their lives from birth to their wedding. The first episode was released on Valentine’s Day and a new episode will be released every day until February 18th. I include the first three below. Visit the Victoria 4 Albert website for the next two days to see the remaining two episodes.

The private non-profit Historic Royal Palaces — stewards of the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace — commissioned animator Chiara Ambrosio to create the series as a teaser for their upcoming new permanent exhibit on Queen Victoria’s life that is being installed at Kensington Palace even as I type. Like the Victoria 4 Albert series, Victoria Revealed uses extracts from Victoria’s journals and letters to give visitors an inside view of her life as a girl and young woman living in Kensington Palace, her marriage to Albert, her life as Queen, mother and grieving widow.

Important paintings, sculpture, jewellery, clothing and many other historic objects will be combined with audiovisual displays and low-tech interactives to evoke key moments and themes in Queen Victoria’s life.

The fascinating history of Britain’s longest reigning monarch will be illuminated through these carefully selected exhibits – ranging from her tiny black silk baby shoes, a collection of her toys, her wedding dress (displayed for the first time in a decade), mourning clothing worn following the death of Prince Albert in 1861, and archive footage of her Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

Exhibits will also include music Albert wrote for her, jewelry he designed for her, and drawings they made of each other as newlyweds. For a glimpse into their family life, their children’s baby clothes, toys and accessories like a carved cradle and a teething ring will be on display.

The new exhibition opens March 26th, in time for The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics. The Palace has been closed since January to set up the exhibit and for other refurbishments that will spruce up the State Apartments, improve the visitor facilities and provide wheelchair access to all the floors.

A purported portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln by Francis Bicknell Carpenter that hung in the governor’s mansion in Springfield, Illinois for three decades turns out to be neither Mary Todd Lincoln nor by Francis Bicknell Carpenter. It’s a painting of an anonymous 19th century woman by an anonymous painter that was intentionally altered by a con man in 1929 to defraud the Lincoln family.

The con man in question was one Lew Bloom, né Ludwig Pflum, a sometime circus performer, vaudevillian and later art collector who was described in his obituary as having “dabbled in oil paintings.” He dabbled on that oil painting of an anonymous lady, darkening her hair and eyes, changing her facial features, painting over a cross pendant and adding a brooch with a miniature of Abraham Lincoln to make her look like an idealized portrait of Mary Todd.

Mr. Bloom concocted a story to accompany his handiwork, saying that Mrs. Lincoln surreptitiously approached Mr. Carpenter while he was at the White House working on his 15-by-9-foot painting, “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation,” which hangs in the Capitol. She had planned a party, he said, where she would give the portrait as a surprise to her husband.

But, as the story went, after John Wilkes Booth shot the president at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, the distraught and impoverished first lady asked Mr. Carpenter to dispose of it. Mr. Carpenter, Mr. Bloom claimed, sold it to a wealthy Philadelphia family, the Neafies, who in turn gave it to Mr. Bloom’s sister Susan, in thanks for her nursing a relative through a long illness.

He had this melodrama notarized to make it look official and everyone fell for it, most prominently Robert Todd Lincoln’s daughter Jessie. Her father had died in 1926. She was keen to rehabilitate his reputation which had long been sullied by the ugly aftermath of his attempt to have his mother committed to an insane asylum against her will in May of 1875. Illinois law at the time required a public insanity trial before anybody could be forcibly committed and the trial of the woman who had been First Lady to a martyred President just 10 years before was major news. A jury declared her insane after three hours of testimony and she was sent to Bellevue Place, by all accounts a nice rest home kind of place rather than the scary Victorian asylum one imagines.

Still, Mary was a highly sympathetic figure to the public and Robert, who now controlled her finances, was seen as a heartless, greedy, unnatural son. That reputation was solidified three months later when Mary engineered her release by recruiting important politicians to come to her defense and planting stories in the press about her sanity and Robert’s cupidity. Mary died in 1882, still estranged from her son.

This wasn’t ancient history even in 1929. In late 1927, Robert’s widow Mary Harlan Lincoln was approached by the granddaughter of James and Myra Bradwell, a couple who had helped Mary Todd Lincoln bust out of the asylum, who planned to publish a book about Mary Todd based on her correspondence with the Bradwells. Mary Harlan Lincoln was so alarmed she paid $22,500, a huge sum at the time, to buy the manuscript and the original letters which she of course never published. (They survived, though, and were discovered by a historian in 2005.)

This is the context in which Mr. Bloom managed to scam Jessie Harlan Lincoln into spending thousands of dollars for a sentimental portrait of some random lady who even when repainted still didn’t look all that much like Mary Todd Lincoln. The family kept the painting until 1976 when Jessie Harlan Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith donated it to the Illinois State Historical Library, now the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

The library had it examined by professionals at the Art Institute of Chicago who of course saw that it had been overpainted and that the lady underneath the retouchings didn’t look at all like Mary Todd, but they thought the overpainting was the work of sloppy restorers rather than deliberate fraud at the time of its sale. They wrote off the original portrait’s lack of resemblance to Mary Todd as an idealized view of the sitter. They restored the painting, revealing the cross but leaving the miniature of Abraham Lincoln, and then hung it in the governor’s mansion.

Last year the library sent the painting to conservator Barry Bauman for cleaning. He delved further into the alterations and researched the history of the painting. He discovered Bloom’s dabbling hand and that whoever the sitter was, she wasn’t painted by Francis Bicknell Carpenter. He restored the painting to its original condition. She’s blue-eyed now and the Lincoln brooch is a little scroll of flowers. She won’t be returning to the governor’s mansion, but the library might put her up just because of the interesting backstory.

A wooden lectern carved by indigenous artists shortly after the arrival of Columbus has returned to Cuba after almost 80 years in the Vatican’s Missionary Ethnological Museum.

Eusebio Leal Spengler, the official historian of the city of Havana, appealed to the director of the Vatican Museums for the loan. Perhaps because Pope Benedict XVI will be visiting Cuba at the end of March, no less an august personage than the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone authorized the loan, noting that it was done “as a great exception.” The unique artifact went on display in the Museum of the City of Havana on February 5th and will remain there the entire year.

According to family tradition, the shell-shaped lectern first belonged to Friar Bartolomé de Las Heras who traveled to the New World on Columbus’ second voyage (1493 – 1496) and then settled in Cuba to convert the savages. It remained in the Las Heras family in Cuba for hundreds of years until it was given to a justice of the Cuban Supreme Court, who gave it to Doña Anna Moulin y Sabon de Morel, who gave it to her son the priest.

In 1935, its owner Father Pierre-Baptiste Morel donated it to the Pope. He included a write-up of the long record of ownership, which is why we know of the piece’s reputed connection to Las Heras. Grain of salt, of course. Family legends can make one hell of a game of telephone. The age of the artifact is not in dispute, however, and both the materials used — fish bones, tortoiseshell, the wood — and the carving style confirm that it was made by indigenous people.

Archaeological evidence indicates that even before 1510, certain indigenous Taino groups had fled from La Española and taken refuge in easternmost Cuba, so it is highly probable that the area of Santiago de Cuba was where Columbus’ lectern was made. It is the oldest example of New World indigenous Christian art and illustrates the process of bilateral exchange and intercultural contact. The lectern, carved by indigenous artists from local materials, is a vivid expression of this process: in Christian iconography, shells are associated with resurrection and eternal life; for indigenous peoples they had great symbolic value, due to being linked to cults around water and fertility.

It certainly looks like something Venus might have been birthed on. It’s interesting to see the entirely unwitting connection between Greek polytheistic iconography and native Caribbean.

Unlike his first time at bat, Columbus’ second voyage had a specific brief of converting the indigenous peoples to Christianity. There are no priests listed on the passenger manifests of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, but the second time he came back with 17 ships and 1200 people, among them a number of priests and Franciscan friars. The first mass in the Americas was held in a temporary church built on the island of Hispaniola on January 6, 1494, Friar Bernal Buil presiding.

Also on that second voyage was Pedro de las Casas, a wealthy merchant whose son, Bartolomé de las Casas, would in 1510 become the first priest ordained in the Americas. A landowner and slave holder who actively participated in slave-taking raids, Bartolomé saw so much brutality in the conquest of Cuba in 1513 that despite his own involvement, the next year while contemplating Ecclesiasticus 34:18-22 for a sermon, he had an epiphany and realized that the Spanish treatment of indigenous peoples was naught but cruelest injustice.

He spent the rest of his life an advocate for indigenous rights. He sent his 1542 book, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, to Prince Philip II of Spain. It was hugely influential. Later that year King Charles V passed the “New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians,” which abolished native slavery in the Americas.

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.