The History Blog

Titian’s David and Goliath (1542-44) in Venice’s Basilica Santa Maria della Salute was damaged by water when firefighters soaked the roof while fighting a fire in the seminary next door. David and Goliath was displayed on the ceiling of the basilica’s sacristy along with 2 other works by Titian (Abraham and Isaac and Cain and Abel).

“I saw water dripping from the painting for an hour” after the fire at an adjacent construction site was put out late on Sunday, the head of Venice’s museum agency Vittorio Sgarbi told AFP, adding that he rushed to the scene after seeing the fire while dining at a nearby restaurant.

Workers have erected scaffolding to inspect the damaged “David and Goliath” along with two other Titians that look down from the ceiling of Santa Maria della Salute’s vestry.

“The painting might have experienced some alteration, but nothing that can’t be restored,” said Sgarbi, a well-known art critic.

David and Goliath was restored 20 years ago. It’s that recent restoration work that is most likely to have been affected by the water. Restorers nowadays use “reversible” colors to ensure that they don’t fall into the trap of past restorations that ended up materially altering the original canvas. That makes them easy to remove in case they’ve made a mistake without needing to use any harsh solvents that might damage the original brushstrokes. That also makes them more susceptible to external elements like, oh, say, gallons of water from firefighter hoses, but by design they’re easy to repair so that’s why Sgarbi doesn’t sound too upset.

There are several other Titian paintings in the vestry of the basilica (8 tondi of the Doctors of the Church and the Evangelists) which may have been damaged when the sprinkler system went off in response to the fire next door. Any damage that may have occurred isn’t immediately obvious. They will all be carefully examined and repaired as necessary.

Santa Maria della Salute (Saint Mary of Health) was built in 1631 as a votive offering to the Virgin Mary, considered the protector of the Venetian Republic, to end the devastating plague of 1630.

In a brazen smash-and-grab captured on security cameras, 2 thieves stole a 17th century gold ingot from the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum on Key West, Florida. The 11-inch, 74.85-ounce gold bar was kept in a bulletproof polymer case that had a hole in it so visitors to the museum could put their hand in and hold the bar.

“Everybody who comes to the museum is encouraged to lift the gold bar and to have a firsthand experience with history,” said Melissa Kendrick, the museum’s executive director. “This is one of the most iconic and best-known objects in the museum.”

Somehow one of the thieves managed to break through the case, lift out the bar and walk casually out the door with the ingot in his pocket. The security footage (which you can see in this CNN video) doesn’t show how they broke through bulletproof plastic. I can’t detect a weapon or device of any kind. It looks like he just reaches in and pulls out the gold bar, but they had to bust up the case to do it.

The ingot was found in 1980 by famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher. He and his team were looking for the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha galleon, a treasure ship that left Havana in 1622 along with a fleet of 27 other ships crammed to the rafters with New World booty only to be felled by a hurricane. Instead he found the wreck of one of the other 7 ships from that treasure fleet which went down in the storm: the Santa Margarita.

The gold ingot was one of the more dramatic pieces Fisher recovered from the Santa Margarita. Not only is it a large and handsome, but it has a variety of unique markers including Roman numerals marking it as 16-karat gold, a symbol identifying its owner, and dots indicating the taxes paid on it to the Spanish crown.

Its estimated value is $550,000, but the weight of the gold alone is worth $75,000. The museum is offering a $10,000 reward for its return. Here’s hoping the bastards don’t just melt it down and smoke 70 grand worth of meth.

Ongoing excavations of the site of The Theater, the 16th century London playhouse where Shakespeare first performed as an actor with The Lord Chamberlain’s Men company of players and later debuted some of his most famous plays, have revealed an intemperate number of drinking vessels. Authorities at the time described The Theater as a “school for all wickedness and vice” so it’s not surprisingly that audiences were well lubricated. There was even a riot on the premises that required the police investigation in 1580.

Archaeologists from the Museum of London also found the remains of the porcelain piggy banks (not actually shaped like piggies) which held the theater’s earnings until they were pooled together for division of the spoils among the company.

The broken, ceramic money boxes, which had to be smashed to give up their contents, have been traced to the playhouse’s accounts office. The earnings were the subject of dozens of lawsuits involving the actor and manager, James Burbage, and The Theatre’s other co-owner, John Brayne. [...]

Other playhouses were regarded by London authorities as “an offence to the godly” and a “hindrance to the Gospel”. The playhouses were well known for “unchaste matters, lascivious devices and other lewd and ungodly practices”. Theatre-goers were seen as “the worst sort” of “evil and disordered people” who skipped work “to mis-spend their time”.

Excavations at New Inn Yard, Shoreditch, are building up that picture. Archaeologists have unearthed scores of fragments of mid- to late 16th century wine and ale flagons and mugs – found in what was probably the playhouse’s bar area. Disorderly behaviour, doubtless often partly fuelled by alcohol – was one of the reasons the authorities disliked the establishment.

The rabble liked the establishment just fine, obviously, and no wonder. Historians believe The Theatre was where Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet premiered, and if not the first stage to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Love’s Labour’s Lost, it was among the first.

Interestingly, The Theater’s drunken audience may have in part been owing to the site’s previous use as a monastery. The remains of St John the Baptist Priory, a large and prosperous monastery founded in the 12th century then shut down during Henry VIII’s dissolution of monasteries in 1539, have been found along with the The Theater remains. Museum of London archaeologists suspect Burbage actually used the alehouse, re-purposing it as a tap house attached to the theater. Later imitators like The Globe and The Rose had in-house pubs, and we know the alehouse was still being used as such after the monastery was shut down, so it makes sense that The Theater might have taken advantage of the sweet location to start a trend.

The only remains of the theater’s structure that have been found thus far are an inner wall, a fragment of the outer wall, and the compacted gravel courtyard which is where the general audiences would have stood. The wooden superstructure never had a chance to survive intact. Burbage’s sons dismantled it in 1598 (without the property owner’s knowledge) and used the wood to the build The Globe theater where Shakespeare’s players moved. That ill-gotten timber burned down with the first Globe 14 years after its illicit recycling.

After 18 months of meticulous restoration, Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks went back on display in London’s National Gallery Wednesday. The painting has been coated in a layer of varnish in 1948 (yeah, go figure) which had become badly discolored, tinting the masterpiece with a yellowish wash. The varnish layer was also cracked and had absorbed dust and dirt, obscuring the subtlety and depth of the design.

Conservators removed the cracked and yellowed varnish, but left a very thin layer so as to protect the top surface of the paint. The change in color is noticeable but not a huge night-and-day alteration. The colors are more saturated, and you can see a lot more detail in the dark areas.

By removing the varnish, restorers revealed not only fresh details but also were able to identify more areas that were likely painted by Leonardo’s hand than they expected. There’s another Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre that was made earlier, you see, between 1483-1486. That one was thought to be mostly the work of Leonardo himself, whereas the National Gallery version was painted considerably later (some time before 1508) and although it was attributed to the master, because of was considered to have been primarily painted by his assistants.

The conservation work and study of materials and techniques uncovered different parts of the painting reached different stages of completion – the angel’s hand was barely sketched while the heads of the main figures appear completely finished, the gallery says.

“In the past, gallery curators, like many scholars of Renaissance painting elsewhere, have explained the different levels of finish and resolution in the picture by arguing that Leonardo was helped by assistants,” the gallery said.

“It now seems possible that Leonardo painted all the picture himself, leaving some parts just sketched or yet to be completely resolved and others fully worked up.”

Considering that the original commission for the painting was made in 1483 (the commission papers are still extant), and that he finished the first version fairly quickly, it’s interesting that he kept working on the design for another 25 years. Especially since he never actually sold the first one to the people who commissioned it. It was supposed to be central panel of a carved altarpiece for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan, but Leonardo went in another direction and he decided to sell it privately for more money, probably to Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan.

Three elaborately decorated 17th c. Delftware bowls have been found by archaeologists excavating a period garbage pit on the south bank of Thames. The Southwark area of London was a party neighborhood in the 17th century, with bars, brothels and spectacles galore. The bowls would not have been as valuable then as they are now, but to find them thrown away in the red light district is still a surprising turn.

The pieces are a charger platter from the 1660s painted with tulips, a bowl painted with a boy taunting a dog, and a bowl dated 1674 which commemorates the marriage of Mr. Nathaniel Townsend of the Leathersellers Company. They’re tin-glazed, a ceramic known today as Delftware even when made in Britain rather than in the famous Dutch ceramics center of Delft.

Roy Stephenson, Head of Archaeological Collections at the Museum of London, said the richly decorated bowls should be seen as rare pieces of fine art in their own right today.

“The thing about tin-glazed wear is every piece is unique because it is painted individually by hand,” he told Reuters.

“The analogy I use about 17th century Delftware is: if you were to try and acquire 17th century art today you would have to be a multi millionaire,” said Stephenson, adding that it was the most unusual group find he had seen in the last 20 years.

There are no signatures or artists’ marks, but the ceramics would have been seen as pieces of art for display on tables and mantelpieces, not as food vessels or utilitarian items.

The bowls were found in fragments during preparation for an upcoming rail extension. Archaeologists pieced them back together. There are still a few bits missing, but there’s more than enough left to make a handsome display in the “War, Plague and Fire” gallery of the Museum of London.

Another slow news Sunday here, but I did find an addictive little YouTube channel run by Historic Royal Palaces, the British independent charity which cares for the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace. The videos in the channel cover the history of those sites and their royal inhabitants.

First one’s free about Henry VIII’s enormous kitchens at Hampton Court Palace. At 36,000 square feet, the Hampton Court kitchens are the largest surviving Renaissance kitchens in Europe.

Once you’ve gotten your fill of that, there are a bunch more about the food history of the Tudor court: Lighting a Tudor fire without matches, What the cooks wore and why, Turning the spit, Show and tell with spices, and King’s Confectionary.

Still that’s just scratching the surface. There are a dozen more videos about Henry VIII, his politics, his culture, his lovahs. Scroll down the list on the right of the uploads page to feed your Tudor addiction or to commune with the Tower of London ravens or find out about royal toilets through the ages

Saturday a few pieces of Caravaggio (maybe) were placed reverently on red velvet pillow in a crystal urn and carried to Porto Ercole on a tall ship in tribute to the final sea voyage that brought Caravaggio to Porto Ercole in 1610. Some fragments of his skull, a piece of femur, and part of the base of his spine were given a hero’s welcome by the crowd.

Some people, however, are less than gruntled at the spectacle and at the weak scholarship/shameless tourism-grubbing behind it.

“It’s a put-on that offends the intelligence of people,” said Vincenzo Pacelli, an art historian and scholar of Caravaggio’s final days, accusing the committee of perpetrating an urban legend.

Other critics suggested that as the Italian government seeks to exploit the economic potential of the country’s cultural resources, marketing is trumping serious study.

“In the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio’s death, this committee has concocted a compelling discovery thinking it will attract tourists,” said Tomaso Montanari, who teaches 17th-century art at the University of Naples. “It’s all very depressing.”

Since there was no solid DNA to compare, we really don’t know if it’s him. Then there’s the question of whether exhuming bones of dead luminaries is a worthy endeavor in the first place. After all, we still don’t quite know what killed him. Mr. Vincenti, the leader of the project, thinks Caravaggio died of lead poisoning from handling lead paints, the committee that ran the project pins it on sunstroke hammering his syphilis-weakened body.

Vincenti doesn’t bother to deny the drama is good business for the area. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Mr. Vinceti did not seem to be arguing on Saturday when he said: “It doesn’t end here, Tuscany and Lombardy are about to launch a cultural tourism initiative so that Caravaggio lovers can come to Italy and revisit the places where he lived. We need to promote the great wealth that Italy has in its art and culture.”

Hey, we all gotta make a living, amirite?

Ukrainian and German police forces collaborated to bust a ring of international art thieves who were attempting to sell a stolen Caravaggio painting to a German collector in Berlin.

Ukraine’s Interior Minister Anatoly Mogylyov said that investigations have linked this gang to 20 other major art thefts in the Ukraine, and 20 suspected members of the gang have been detained there. The ministry is filing for extradition of the alleged thieves arrested in Germany.

The German newspaper said police in Germany detained three Ukrainian nationals and a Russian when they attempted to hand over the painting to the buyer.

The painting was brought to Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century. It was long believed to be a copy of a Caravaggio, but the authenticity of the work was established in 2005 while the canvas was on exhibit in Spain.

Soviet experts had declared it authentic in the 1950’s, but the attribution was still questioned until it went on tour in 2005. It was restored in 2006, although from the looks of it it’s going to need a whole new round of tender loving care after how the thieves manhandled it.

The painting, known as “The Taking of Christ,” or “The Kiss of Judas,” was stolen 2 years ago from the Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa, Ukraine. The thieves broke into the museum through a window at night, removed the glass pane shielding the canvas and cut it out of the frame, all without setting off a single alarm. It was major loss to the museum and to the Ukraine. It was their only Caravaggio and the single most valuable painting in the country, worth tens of millions of dollars.

There is another copy of the same painting in Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland. It too is thought to be in Caravaggio’s hand, but it’s hard to say.

A team of forensic anthropologists who have been examining bones from a Porto Ercole crypt for 6 months think they’ve located Caravaggio’s. They can’t be absolutely sure, but all tests consistently point to Caravaggio’s vital statistics so they’re comfortable enough to say there’s an 85% probability that the bones in question belonged to one Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio.

They started with documents uncovered by art historian and Caravaggio expert Maurizio Marini. Marini searched church and hospital records in Port Ercole, the last place Caravaggio is thought to have fled to in 1610 after escaping his umpteenth bloody scrap this time in Naples, where 4 knights in armor wounded him. In the records of the Church Of St Erasmus, Caravaggio was listed as having died in the parish in 1609 and been buried in the small cemetery of nearby San Sebastiano. (The Porto Ercole area of Tuscany was still using the Julian calendar at that time, hence the date discrepancy.)

The San Sebastiano cemetery had been converted into a city park in 1956 and all the bones transferred to 3 crypts in St. Erasmus cemetery, so when the anthropologists decided to look for Caravaggio’s remains, that’s where they started. They sorted through the remains of 30-40 people interred in the first of the crypts, separating out the bones that belonged to men who probably died in the 17th century.

These were then taken to a special laboratory set up for the occasion in a building that used to house the town’s elementary school.

Here they narrowed down the search further, before taking candidate remains to the anthropology department in Ravenna for a series of tests.

The first analysis used carbon-dating, to try establish exactly how old the bones were. Compatible fragments were then tested for high concentrations of lead and mercury, metals that were commonly used in paints during Caravaggio’s day. The final step was DNA testing. Samples were extracted from the bones and compared with male volunteers surnamed Merisi, believed to be descendents of Caravaggio’s brother.

Out of the 9 potential sets, set number 5 hit all the markers: they belonged to a tall man for the time (5′7″), between 38 and 40 years old, who died around 1610, with toxic levels of lead in his bones. The modern DNA samples were found to be 50-60% compatible with the bones, which is about as solid a match as could be expected seeing that the DNA in the remains has degraded over time and none of the current Merisis are direct descendants of Caravaggio who died childless.

The cause of death remains unconfirmed. National Committee for the Promotion of Historic and Cultural Heritage President and famed historical cold case investigator Silvano Vinceti thinks the wounds inflicted by the assassin knights in Naples became infected. They think he may have been weakened by lead poisoning and maybe even suffering from sunstroke, but that last of course can’t be detected via bone analysis.

Art experts are accusing the Louvre museum of having badly botched the restoration of Veronese’s Supper at Emmaus, giving a key female figure not one but two hideous nose jobs.

The first time they made the classic mistake you see so often in cosmetic surgeries today: turning an unusual down-turned nose tip into a pert, straight, little button nose with ultra-thin nostrils. The second time they tried to repair the repair and the result is a weird, wide-nostriled nose which somehow manages to look both flattened and bulbous. The lips have suffered too. They went from thin to bow-shaped to pouty.

Figure 1 is the original face of the mother in Supper at Emmaus. She has a lovely character-filled nose with a gentle bump, a down-turned tip, a slender upper lip and a full bottom one. In figure 2 the “repaints”, additions thought to have been made over the centuries by past restorers, have been removed. In figure 3, you see the first nose job with its button nose and completely different upper lip. Finally figure 4 is how the painting looks now, with its down-turned again but sharper nose tip, misshapen nostrils, amorphously swollen lips and disappeared filtrum.

Michel Favre-Félix, president of the Association for the Respect and Integrity of Artistic Heritage (Aripa) in Paris, said: “Veronese had pictured a noble family mother, as an echo to the Virgin Mary, and it has been turned into a caricature of a 21st-century adolescent, with bloated cheeks and a ridiculous pout.”

He accused the restorers of unnecessarily retouching Veronese’s original and of “falsifying the whole physiognomy and expression”.

More seriously, their “re-retouching”, as he put it, was a covert repainting without leaving any record of their actions in the museum’s files.

Describing the attempt to correct the first restoration as a “tacit admission” of “gross errors”, Favre-Félix said that the museum has refused to acknowledge the second restoration, despite photographic evidence showing how the painting has changed.

The French press went ballistic on the Louvre when they noticed the first restoration, so apparently the museum went in surreptitiously for a second round of Michael Jacksoning but without making a record of it in their own official files. Louvre officials describe the second nose job as a “bichonnée”, ie, a little “pampering”, so minor that there was no reason to add it to the painting’s dossier.

Restoration watchdog group ArtWatch UK will publish an exposé of the Supper at Emmaus nose jobs in their journal this month (available only to members, I’m sad to say), just in time for the Louvre committee’s June 18th meeting to decide whether to restore Leonardo Da Vinci’s Virgin and Child with St Anne. If they do go ahead with it, ArtWatch fears that the Mona Lisa will be next, since there are tons of big money sponsors who would love to throw cash at the Louvre if it meant they would get to be associated with the masterpiece.