The History Blog

In July of 2012, a previously unknown miniature depicting Queen Elizabeth I as the central figure in a reimagining of the Judgment of Paris sold at Christie’s for $453,833, five times its pre-sale estimate. It was purchased by an art dealer who arranged for its sale to the National Portrait Gallery. Although the NPG has nine portraits of Queen Elizabeth, this is the first one that has an allegorical theme which makes the little piece a hugely significant addition to the gallery’s permanent collection.

The postcard-sized (4.5 × 6.25 inches) chalk, gouache and gold on vellum painting was found during a house clearance in south-east England. It’s very rare to find a work of such high quality that has never been published before and allegorical images of Queen Elizabeth I are rare enough as it is. The style of the clothing dates it to around 1590.

The piece is unsigned, but various features and its high quality mark it as the work of Isaac Oliver, a French-born Huguenot miniaturist who was the greatest student of court painter Nicholas Hilliard, known for his miniature portraits of royalty. It’s a re-working of Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, a full-sized painting in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court from 1569 originally attributed to Hans Eworth but now thought to have been painted by Joris Hoefnagel.

In both paintings, Elizabeth holds the Golden Apple of Discord while the three goddesses — Juno, Minerva and Venus — vying for it back away. Elizabeth is both Paris, the prince of Troy who is supposed to assign the apple to the most beautiful of the three, and the ultimate recipient of it. She spurns the discord the apple is intended to cause and instead just keeps it, making her the most beautiful of them all and the bringer of peace. In the Hampton Court painting, Juno appears to be beckoning at her, a suggestion that the Queen follow her into marriage, perhaps, but by the time of the miniature 20 years later, Juno’s extended arm appears to be blocking Venus instead. Elizabeth was no longer susceptible, the allegory suggests, to the blandishments of love and marriage.

The 1569 painting was the first allegorical portrait she had made and the Judgment of Paris was a particularly pointed theme for Elizabeth. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been regaled with pageants on that same subject during her coronation procession which took place in May of 1533, when she was already five months pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth.

The marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon had been declared null and void by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer on May 23rd; Cranmer declared Henry and Anne’s wedding (there was a secret ceremony in December followed by a public one in January after she got pregnant) valid on May 28th. The next day coronation ceremonies began. After two days of barge trips and ceremonial processions, Anne Boleyn was crowned Queen Consort of England on June 1st, 1533.

There are two main accounts of the coronation, one by Edward Hall who was one of the organizers of the festivities, published in a 1548 two-volume history of Tudor kings known as Hall’s Chronicle, and the other a pamphlet by Wynkin de Worde printed in 1533 entitled The Noble Tryumphaunt Coronacyon of Quene Anne, Wyfe unto the Noble Kynge Henry the VIII.

Most of these pageants were mythological allegories involving Greco-Roman deities and heavy-handed symbolism about Anne’s great beauty, chastity (really), fertility and general worthiness to be Queen, a matter by no means universally accepted at this time since Catherine’s spurning and the break with Rome were enormously controversial fresh wounds. Here’s Hall’s description of the Judgment of Paris pageant:

And so roade to the lytle Conduyte, where was a riche pageaunt full of melodye and song, in which pageaunt were Pallas, Iuno, and Venus, and before them stode Mercury, whiche in the name of the three goddesses gave unto her a balle of gold, devided into three, signifying three gifts which these three goddesses gave to her, that is to say, wysedome, ryches, and felicitie.

Here’s Wynkin de Worde’s description of same:

And so her grace passed a lytell further and at the lesser Condyt was a costly and a ryche pagent whereas was goodly armonye of musyke and other mynstrels with syngyng. And within that pagent was fyve costly seates wherin was set these fyve personages that is to wete Juno, Pallas, Mercury and Venus and Parys hauyng a ball of golde presentyng it to her grace with certayne verses of great honour and chyldren syngyng a balade to her grace and prayse to all her ladyes.

Those verses of great honour were written by Nicholas Udall and John Leland who had been enlisted to create English and Latin poems to accompany the pageants and tableaux vivants along the route of the coronation procession from the Tower of London to Westminster Palace on May 30th, 1533.

Udall and Leland’s verses about the Judgment of Paris tableau:

The proud goddesses assaulted great Jove with their immoderate entreaties, asking him for the little golden prize bestowed on consummate beauty. Therefore at the behest of his Dictys-born father [Jupiter], the child of African Atlas [Mercury] flew through the clouds as a companion to the goddesses, and gave the apple to comely Paris as he was pasturing his flocks in the groves of Phrygia’s Mt. Ida, and now the Dardanian [Trojan] shepherd, shaking off his easy sleep, grasped it in his hand, so he might quickly employ his keen judgment to bestow it on a goddess of especial beauty for her enjoyment. Meanwhile the consort of supreme Jove, impatient of delay, demanded this prize of conquering beauty, promising Paris proud realms. Pallas offered her arts, if the prize for comeliness were granted her. Venus, promising him the beds he desired, staked her claim on the little reward of the golden apple. Straightway Paris sweetly smiled, and, casting around his delightful eyes and pointing at Anne, said, “Behold, you may see a woman supreme in all respects, and deserving to carry off even three hundred apples thanks to the goodliness of her virtues. No small gift must be given to Anne. The scepter awaits her, as does the crown, a fitting reward for her virtues. He who bid you come here in search of prizes of beauty, goddesses, set a trap for you, and when he sent you here the Thunderer wanted you to be suffused with no small amount of blushing. You take the apple, Venus, and now all you goddesses may go back to high heaven.”

Many men have told me that Dardanian Paris was an elegant witness to beauties and to all comeliness when, a proud shepherd, he was leading his snow-white flocks over lofty Ida, and with his thrice-fair hand gave the golden apple to Venus, to the indignation of Minerva and Jove’s sister, until comely Anne came along. Thinking this over frequently, I could not see the point of these amazing mysteries until you, divine Venus, came down from heaven on a quick course to us oceanic English and cheerfully gave the golden apple to a woman fairer than yourself, Anne, whose pretty head will soon be encircled by the beauty of a crown gleaming with jewels.

And whose pretty little neck would soon after that be separated from her pretty head.

Elizabeth’s embrace of this particular allegory was a recognizable and highly pointed tribute to her mother. Instead of avoiding the tendentious matter of the legitimacy of Anne’s marriage and thus her own legitimacy as her father’s heir, she chose to associate herself with her mother’s reign as queen of England and reclaim her place as the daughter of royalty on both sides. In the Hampton Court painting, Elizabeth is wearing St. Edward’s Crown, the same imperial crown that Anne was crowned with in 1533.

She had Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses hung in Whitehall Palace near the 1537 Hans Holbein mural of the Tudor dynasty Henry had commissioned when Elizabeth’s half-brother Edward was born. That version of the Tudor dynasty featured King Henry VII back left, King Henry VIII front left, his mother Elizabeth of York back right and Jane Seymour, Henry’s his third wife and mother of his only son, front right. Nobody else made the cut. In this mural her father had tried to scrub Anne and Elizabeth out of the Tudor line; Elizabeth put them both back through the Judgment allegory.

Elizabeth was queen regnant, not queen consort, so as much as the allegory recognized Elizabeth’s matrilineal royalty, it also made a stronger statement about Elizabeth’s status as undisputed ruler. Unlike her mother, she doesn’t receive the apple from Paris or even Venus; she takes the man out of the equation altogether and appoints herself the winner. The three goddesses don’t just accept her as one of their own as they did Anne Boleyn; they acknowledge her as dominant. Juno even loses a shoe in her haste to step back from Elizabeth Regina. The apple she holds is the sovereign’s orb, although in the miniature it doesn’t have the cross and straps of the official orb, it is still a gigantic golden orb indicative of her majesty.

Both the miniature and the Hampton Court painting will go on display at the NPG’s new exhibition Elizabeth I & Her People which will run from October 10th, 2013, through January 5th, 2014. The exhibit will include many portraits of Elizabeth, her court, explorers, ambassadors along with merchants, financiers, lawyers, artists and others who were part of the diverse social classes on the rise in Elizabethan England. Believe it or not, the gallery had already arranged the loan of the larger painting before the miniature appeared on the market. The timing of the find could not have been more fortuitous for the National Portrait Gallery.

The high-pressure jets that sprayed the Mary Rose with fresh water and polyethylene glycol (PEG) for close to 30 years have been turned off. This is an important milestone in the decades-long preservation of the Tudor flagship which sank before Henry VIII’s horrified eyes off the coast of Plymouth on July 19th, 1545. The fine silt of the seabed kept the hull of the ship, the remains of its crew and 19,000 artifacts in eerily good condition until the whole thing was raised in 1982. The Mary Rose was kept in a cold room at 95% humidity and sprayed by jets of chilled filtered, recycled water for 10 years to flush out the corrosive salts, keep the wood cold, prevent it from drying out and from being assaulted by microbes. If it had not been kept constantly wet, the timbers could have shrunk by as much as 50% as water evaporated, leaving a withered, brittle, warped husk behind. Next the ship was sprayed with PEG for 19 years to replace the water in the wood’s cells with a waxy substance that does not evaporate even when dry.

Visitors to the Mary Rose Ship Hall in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard have been able to view the ship for most of this time. In 2009, the hall was closed to make way for the construction of a new museum large enough to display the ship and most of its artifacts together in one place. The Mary Rose was moved to a nearby dry dock and placed inside an air-tight lucite container known as the hotbox. The new museum building was constructed around it.

Now the drying phase of the project begins, just in time for the opening of the new museum on May 31st. The hull of the Mary Rose, still inside the hotbox, is in the center of the new building with galleries running down its length on either side at the same levels as the decks of the ship. As many as 70% of the 19,000 artifacts will be on display in these galleries in the areas in which they were found. Only 5% could be displayed in the previous facility. Artifacts range from everyday use objects like wooden bowls and tankards to fine pewter and silver officers’ ware to cannons to nearly 500 shoes. The skeleton of the ship’s dog, a little terrier conservators have named Hatch because he was found trapped in the door of the carpenter’s cabin when the Mary Rose sank, will also be on view. The idea is to convey the feeling of actually being on board, of seeing what the sailors saw on the decks of the ship just before she went down.

The drying process is expected to take four of five years. Conditioned air will slowly remove the estimated 100 tons of water remaining in the hull. The hotbox is inside a casing so it’s not fully open to public view, but there are windows for visitors to peer through and see the ship as it dries. Once the wood is completely dry, hopefully in 2017, the casing will be removed and the Mary Rose will be visible in all her glory down the middle of the museum.

The Mary Rose is a unique time capsule of Tudor life (quick, somebody call it the Tudor Pompeii of the ocean!). It was Henry’s favorite ship, named after his favorite sister Mary and the Tudor emblem of the rose. It was the first ship to fire a broadside. It’s the only 16th century warship on display in the world and the vast collection of artifacts that have survived and been conserved provide us with a one-of-a-kind glimpse into the daily life of board a ship of that era and of Tudor society in general.

A new restoration of Resurrection, a fresco by Renaissance master Pinturicchio in the Vatican’s Borgia Apartment, has revealed what may the first images of Native Americans in European art. After cleaning the fresco, art restorer Maria Pustka found that some previously indistinct, distant figures in the middle of the composition beneath the risen Christ and a Roman soldier looking up in awe are nude males wearing feather headdresses whose postures suggest they are dancing. Since Pinturicchio painted Pope Alexander VI’s suite of rooms between 1492 and 1494, these could well be the artist’s vision of the friendly naked natives bedecked in parrots that Columbus described upon his return from the first voyage. (I apologize for the tininess of the picture, but it’s all I could find of the restored detail. Edit: I’ve uploaded a slightly bigger one now.)

Vatican Museums Director Antonio Paolucci posits in an article in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that perhaps the Borgia Pope got his hands on a copy of the diary Columbus kept on his first voyage. According to Paolucci, Columbus gave this journal to their Most Catholic Majesties King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who tried to keep it quiet for political reasons but since the pope was Spanish, he probably heard about it anyway.

I think he’s confusing Columbus’ journal, later edited by Bartolomé de las Casas but not published until 1825, with a letter Columbus wrote about the new islands in Southeast Asia he thought he’d discovered. It wasn’t a secret, though. It was an international sensation.

While still on board the Niña as it approached the Iberian peninsula in mid-February, Columbus wrote the letter to Ferdinand and Isabella reporting his findings. Either when landed in Lisbon on March 4th or the harbour of Palos on March 15, 1493, he sent the letter to the king and queen and a copy to Luis de Santangel, Ferdinand II’s finance minister who had raised all the money for the voyage and convinced their majesties to approve of Columbus’ plan. He may also have sent a third to Gabriel Sanchez, Treasurer of Aragon; there’s a fair amount of confusion about the recipients and the sources of the copies.

Although there is some evidence that the King and Queen weren’t keen to have the letter get out — no copies of their majesties’ letter were ever published — by early April, a printed copy the Santangel letter was published in Spain. In May, a Latin translation was circulating in Rome, and the Latin version spread to cities all over Europe within weeks. It had already been set to Italian verse by June, 1493. You can read an English translation here.

Pope Alexander VI certainly saw the Latin version of the letter in Rome, and in any case by then he was fully versed in the discovery because he had to arbitrate between Portugal and Spain on the question of who got to claim the New World. Portugal asserted that the new territories belonged to the Portuguese crown, despite the fact that Spanish ships had made the discovery, because previous papal bulls had granted Portugal extremely broad rights to any dominions populated by non-Christians. Romanus Pontifex, for example, issued in 1455 by Pope Nicholas V, stipulated that the King Alfonso and his heirs had exclusive dominion over all lands and seas “though situated in the remotest parts unknown to us, and subject them to their own temporal dominion” and that no other power, ecclesiastical or temporal, may interfere with this great Christianizing conquest in any way.

Ferdinand and Isabella accepted the previous bulls, but asked Pope Alexander VI to review the question. The pope was Valencian now, so they figured, correctly as it happened, that they might just pull a rabbit out of a hat, or rather a rich new colony out of a mitre. Diplomatic negotiations between Portugal and Spain began in April. Meanwhile, the Pope got to work busily on crafting a new bull. Inter Caetera was issued on May 4, 1493, superseding three edits edicts issued that same day and the day before. Dudum Siquidem, which resolved some of the issues Inter Caetera had left open, was issued September 26th, 1493.

All of this was going down while Pinturicchio and his assistants lavishly frescoed the Pope’s apartment. Resurrection was painted on the wall of the Hall of Mysteries, one of three rooms in the apartment that were Alexander VI’s personal living space. The pope himself is portrayed prominently in the painting, on his knees, hands joined in prayer, before Christ’s resurrected golden glory. Considering how the Pope spent a great deal of 1493 dealing with the ramifications of Columbus’ discovery, and how all these political issues were framed in terms of who should get to convert the newly-found pagans to Christianity, it makes sense that they would make a cameo in this fresco.

After Alexander VI’s death in 1503, the apartment was closed by his successor Pope Pius III. Neither he nor anyone else for a few centuries wanted to be associated with the scandalous Borgia papacy, so the rooms with their gorgeous frescoes were sealed off for almost 400 years. Pope Leo XII finally opened them in 1889. Their years of disuse had kept the rooms in good condition and kept subsequent popes with bad taste from messing with the frescoes. The rooms are now part of the Vatican Library. Since 1973, they’ve housed the Vatican Collection of Modern Religious Art, a collection of more than 600 donated works by the likes of Chagall, Kandinsky and Gaugin.

The Virgin and Saint Vincent, 16th century tapestry stolen from a church in Roda de Isábena, a tiny town in the high Pyrenees, in 1979 was officially returned to Spain on Wednesday, April 17th, in a ceremony at the Spanish’s ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director John Morton and Spanish Ambassador Ramón Gil-Casares spoke at the ceremony, describing the recovery operation as a fine example of what can be accomplished when law enforcement collaborates even across national boundaries.

This was certainly a joint effort, starting with the Spanish Civil Guard and coming to fruition in the United States. The stolen tapestry was first identified by a curator at a museum in Lérida when he saw it in an auction catalogue from the Brussels Antiques and Fine Art Fair of January 2010. The Spanish authorities contacted the Belgian police who investigated the tapestry and found that it was co-owned by a Belgian gallery owner and two partners in Milan and Paris. They found the owners had shopped the piece around to various galleries since 2008.

For reasons that are not clear to me but probably have something to do with auction houses being, on the whole, fairly amoral organizations, the discovery of the tapestry did not stop the sale. It went ahead in April of 2010. The tapestry sold for $369,000 to a dealer in Houston. That’s when Spain turned to the United States for help in stopping this sick cycle of fencing stolen goods. They invoked the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty and after an investigation, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents in Houston seized the tapestry in November of 2012.

There was never any doubt that this was the tapestry stolen in December of 1979 from the Cathedral of St. Vincent Martyr of Roda de Isábena. It’s a wool-silk weave depicting three saints – Saint Ramón, Saint Vincent and Saint Valerius — paying homage to the Virgin Mary and Christ child. Saint Valerius was bishop of Zaragoza in the late 3rd, early 4th century. Saint Vincent was his deacon. They were both tortured under Domitian (a gridiron was reputedly involved) and died at Roman hands. Relics of Saints Vincent and Valerius are still kept at the cathedral in Roda.

Saint Ramón was bishop of Roda-Barbastre from 1104 until his death in 1126. He’s the one who commissioned the building of the Romanesque Cathedral we see today (with many later additions). His remains were buried in a beautiful sarcophagus in the cathedral. All three of these saints, therefore, have strong connections to Roda and the Huesca region in general. The tapestry was commissioned to honor the town’s main religious figures and it hung above the church’s altar for nearly 500 years.

The sleepy town of Roda d’Isàvena was a county capital and seat of the diocese in Saint Ramón’s days. The episcopal see was moved to Lleida in 1149 and Roda slowly contracted from a bustling regional center to a one-horse hamlet. Today it is the smallest village in Spain to have a cathedral. This sadly made it a prime target for the depredations of Erik the Belgian, real name René Alphonse van den Berghe, an art thief who for 30 years looted museums, churches and monasteries mainly in Spain but also elsewhere in Europe.

He was arrested in Spain in 1981 and jailed for the next four years (with a few hours’ break in 1983 when he faked a heart attack and then escaped from the hospital by literally tying his sheets together and climbing out the window; he was immediately recaptured). He was never convicted of anything, probably because during those years stolen and missing artwork just kept turning up mysteriously. In other words, he cut a deal, and now the statute of limitations has run out so he feels free to confess/brag about his exploits which, according to him, include 600 thefts of more than 6,000 artifacts — statues, paintings, tapestries, jewels, manuscripts, altarpieces, you name it.

Spain was one of his favorites targets because it was packed with cultural patrimony kept in unsecured venues in small, off-the-beaten-path towns. It was easy for him to just walk in and help himself to whatever he liked. It’s hard to know what’s true or not because he’s a scumbag and proven liar, but according to interviews he’s given, much of his thieving was not just enabled but actively commissioned by church authorities. He claims whenever the Vatican wanted to convert some of their clutter into cash, they’d sell it to him and call it stolen in public.

Apparently he prided himself on selecting artifacts based on their beauty rather than their monetary value. Not that that inspired him to treat them with due reverence. One of the objects he stole from Roda’s Cathedral of St. Vincent Martyr is the chair of Saint Ramón, a 9th century cross-frame wooden stool carved with Nordic motifs that is the oldest piece of furniture known to survive in Spain. Erik the Belgian cut it to pieces to make it easier to smuggle out of the country. Decades later, after the statute of limitations had run out, he arranged for the return of some fragments. Those are now arranged on an acrylic cross-frame structure to give visitors and pilgrims some sense of how it once looked.

As he tells the story, the chair was burned by his men when he was being tortured by the cops in 1982 and they mailed the fragments to the Ministry of Culture, but from what I can tell from news articles, as late as the mid-1990s the chair was in parts unknown. The remains don’t look scorched at all either. It’s probably just another one of his tall tales, like when he says he broke into Yuste Monastery, where Holy Roman Emperor Charles V moved to after his abdication in 1556 until his death in 1558, stripped it completely bare of all its valuables and then had sex with his girlfriend on Charles’s bed.

I suppose we should be happy The Virgin and Saint Vincent tapestry is still in one piece and, uhh, unstained. Conservators will double-check on that score. The tapestry will be kept at the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain (IPCE), a center for restoration with the latest technology and experts in the field. It will be examined and analyzed in great detail to see if it requires any interventions to keep it from deteriorating any further and to determine the optimal conditions for its long-term preservation.

Since that picture’s a little blurry, here’s some B-roll from the ceremony that shows the tapestry being carried into the room in a crate, then unrolled and displayed.

There are only about a dozen of Michelangelo’s drawings in the United States, so the US exhibit of 26 important drawings from the extensive collection of the Casa Buonarroti, the museum established by his family in a house he once owned in Florence, is a not-to-be-missed event. Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane Masterpiece Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti is an exhibit of figural and architectural drawings by Michelangelo on subjects both religious (sacred) and worldly (profane). It debuted in February at the College of William & Mary’s Muscarelle Museum of Art in honor of the museum’s 30th anniversary and has now moved to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where it will run from April 21st until June 30th.

The theme is an exploration of Michelangelo’s personal philosophy, his attitude towards religious and secular matters, as reflected in his drawings. The sacred sphere is represented by his depictions of religious figures like his large scale Virgin and Child and in architectural designs for churches like the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence. His ground plan of the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome, which was too complex and expensive to ever make it out of the planning stage, is one of the largest drawings in the collection and has never been seen before in the United States. The profane architectural pieces are mainly designs for military fortifications, but much like his sacred pieces, the plans are so elaborate they would have been far too expensive and difficult for the conception to become reality.

The star of the profane figural drawings is Cleopatra. Although a worldly subject, on one page back and front, she incarnates both sides of the show’s theme. The recto or front depicts Cleopatra’s idealized calm in the moment when the serpent strikes her breast. It’s a Madonna-like expression of dignity and resignation. Her elegance and refinement have earned her distinction as one of Michelangelo’s most beautiful figures, but what’s on the back is not serene and not beautiful either, at least according to some beholders. The verso is a drawing of the same Cleopatra, only this one’s expression is sheer agony. The details are nowhere near as refined: she’s a grotesque with empty, wonky eyes and buckteeth. How these contrasting ladies came to find themselves on the front and back of a page is a question that has long intrigued art historians.

The Cleopatra on the recto is one of the rare complete, finished pieces Michelangelo drew. Most of his drawings were studies or sketches for projects that would later come to fruition in another medium. Art historian Johannes Wilde dubbed these finished pieces “presentation drawings,” because they were intended to be given as gifts. Rarely for a Michelangelo drawing, there’s a clearly documented ownership history for Cleopatra that confirms it was a gift from the master to a handsome young friend.

Some time during the 1530s, Michelangelo gave Cleopatra to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a Roman nobleman who met Michelangelo in 1532 when the artist was 57 and Cavalieri 23 years old. They became fast friends and remained so until Michelangelo’s death 32 years later. The question of whether Michelangelo’s feelings for his beautiful friend were more than platonic is an open one, but he did dedicate more poems to Cavalieri than to anyone else (see this one for an example; the female pronouns in the translation are not present in the Italian) and gave him at least six completed drawings (The Fall of Phaethon is the most elaborate).

In 1562, two years before Michelangelo’s death, Cavalieri was forced to give Cleopatra to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. He had little choice in the matter and made it known in his letter accompanying the “gift” that depriving himself of that drawing caused him as much pain as if he’d lost a son. Half a century later in 1614, Duke Cosimo II donated Cleopatra and several other drawings to Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger for the gallery he was creating in the family home that would become the Casa Buonarotti museum.

According to an inventory of Medici artifacts, Cleopatra was hanging in a frame from the 1560s, which means the ugly Cleopatra was out of view at least as soon as it left Cavalieri’s possession. At some point, probably in the 19th century, a backing was glued to the drawing, a common curatorial technique at that time to preserve fragile paper works. You could still faintly see there was another drawing on the back if you lifted it to the light, so when the Uffizi gallery was restoring the piece in August of 1988 in preparation for a major show at Washington’s National Gallery, they decided to remove the backing to reveal what was there.

The discovery of the second, much more anguished Cleopatra made international news. Some experts believed it was also done by Michelangelo himself, others that it was clearly not in the master’s hand, others flip-flopped. But what if the ratchet Cleopatra came first and the more accomplished one later? What if in fact the rough, anguished figure is the recto and the finished one the verso? It wouldn’t be the first time Michelangelo turned over a page that had already been drawn on by a student. What if that student in this case were Tommaso de’ Cavalieri himself?

Cavalieri tried his hand by drawing the figure on the verso. Not yet a Cleopatra, the head may have been inspired by an antique sculpture that the two friends inspected together, such as the famous Sleeping Ariadne in the Belvedere Court of the Vatican. Or it may have been inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Famous Women: is this Agrippina, the grieving wife of Germanicus, or the Carthaginian Queen Sofonisba just after draining the fateful cup of poison? However, Cavalieri’s halting effort fell short of its classical inspiration (the display of teeth had especially negative connotations). To demonstrate “buon disegno,” Michelangelo reversed the sheet and performed a miracle of artistic alchemy: ugliness became beauty, harrowing but unbecoming emotion became serene resignation, an indecorous head was transformed into a doomed Cleopatra. We are privileged witnesses of Michelangelo turning base matter into gold.

I like this theory. To my admittedly inexpert eye, the rough Cleopatra doesn’t look like any of Michelangelo’s figural studies which even at their most dashed off are composed and lovely.

Last Thursday, March 28th, at 11:20 PM, a woman in her 30s identified as a German tourist of Polish origin snapped a finger off The Rape of Polyxena, an 19th century statue by Pio Fedi in the Loggia dei Lanzi adjoining the Uffizi Gallery. The private security guard contracted with watching the Loggia at night alerted the police immediately after the incident, giving them a precise description of the alleged culprit. The police were then able to stop the woman as she attempted to leave the area. She has been charged with damaging the statue.

Rape in this sense means kidnapping, like the rape of the Sabine women, a classical subject that is depicted in another of the statues in the Loggia. The statue depicts Achilles taking Trojan princess Polyxena who has offered herself in exchange for the return of her brother Hector’s body. Achilles grasps her securely in his left arm while he raises the sword with his right arm to beat back Queen Hecuba, Polyxena’s mother, who clings desperately to her daughter. On his back under Achille’s feet is the dead Prince Hector. It’s the index finger of Hector’s left hand that was snapped off.

This is sadly not the first time Hector’s fingers have been subjected to vandalism. They are all plaster now because all of them have had to be replaced at one time or another. This is the third time in just four years that somebody has damaged Hector’s fingers. The most recent incident before this latest one happened last October, again the victim was the index finger of the left hand. That may have been an accident rather than a deliberate act of vandalism, though. Security cameras only show one person getting anywhere near the statue between the last time the finger was seen in place and the time it was found missing: the expert who was dusting it.

When the finger was replaced in October, they wisely planned ahead, inserting a small wooden dowel between the finger and the hand that would make reattaching easier and that would help avoid additional damage to the marble. Alberto Casciani, the same restorer who inserted the dowel and attached a plaster replacement finger in October, was enlisted on Friday morning to reattach the finger again, so poor Hector was only missing his index finger for a few hours this time around.

The Rape of Polyxena was sculpted between 1855 and 1865. Pio Fedi researched it assiduously — many of his sketches and plans for the piece are in museums in Florence and Rome — and it’s widely considered the greatest of all his works. Its held as a highly significant example of 19th century Italian art and has the honor of being the only modern(ish) sculpture in the Loggia dei Lanzi. All of the other sculptures are ancient — like Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus, a late 1st century A.D. Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd century B.C. — or Renaissance — like the bronze Perseus with the head of Medusa (1554) by Benvenuto Cellini, his masterpiece and the most famous and beloved of the statues in the Loggia.

The Loggia dei Lanzi is an arched open area in the Piazza della Signoria that was originally built in the 14th century to hold public ceremonies. It got its name in the 16th century when Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici briefly stationed his German mercenary Landsknecht troops — pikemen and infantrymen reputed to be the best fighters money could buy — in the Loggia. Landsknecht was Italianized to Lanzichenecchi which was shortened to Lanzi. It was already a public sculpture gallery by then. Cellini’s Perseus was specifically commissioned by Cosimo I for placement in the Loggia.

It may not retain its public openness for long if this kind of vandalism continues. For now the Uffizi has simply increased security, but there are rumblings of more draconian approaches to come.

“We need to section off the Loggia dei Lanzi and allow only controlled access, not free access, as has been the case up to now. Perhaps it is even the case to close it off at night,” Uffizi Director Antonio Natali said.

“It’s not the first time something like this has happened, and we need to find a protection system so that these events are not repeated.”

Andreas Vesalius, the 16th century physician from Brussels, is considered the founder of modern anatomy. He revolutionized medicine by introducing hands-on dissection of human cadavers into surgical studies and by exposing the errors of medieval authorities like Mondino de’ Liuzzi, the Arabic translators of ancient Greek and Latin sources, and even the newly revived, translated and mass-printed works of Galen who Vesalius followed in many ways. It was Vesalius’ skill at surgery, already widely recognized by the time he finished his studies, and his dedication to practical anatomical exploration which drove him to correct Galenic misapprehensions caused by his dissection of Barbary macaques instead of people.

In 1543, Vesalius published a groundbreaking anatomy textbook: De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). The content was based on his lectures as Chair of Surgery and Anatomy at the University of Padua where he was the first physician to insist on performing his own dissections on human cadavers while students closely observed his work. Before him, lecturers read from accepted authorities while barber-surgeons dissected animals, and a human once a year in winter when the cadaver could last longer. A student of his noted with amazement that Vesalius single-handedly did the work three men — the lecturer, the demonstrator and the dissector — had done before him. He also was the first professor to bring detailed anatomically correct drawings into the class as visual aids to his lectures.

This innovative approach was reflected in his book as well. De Fabrica wasn’t the first book based on recent explorations of human anatomy, but it was the first to include truly modern, complex anatomical drawings made by skilled artists from the school of Titian who were actually present at dissections. Other anatomical texts had sketches made by the doctors themselves, so not surprisingly they often were little more than symbolic blobs bearing no resemblance to life. Vesalius’ artwork were professional engravings printed by Joannis Oporini of Basel, Switzerland, one of the greatest printers of the age. The engravings were meticulously precise and detailed to a degree never before seen.

Also represented in De Fabrica is Vesalius’ extensive collection of corrections. For years he had taken notes and published short tracts correcting what he believed were the errors of other anatomists, including living ones like his former teachers Jean Dubois (aka Sylvius) and Johann Guinther von Andernach at the University of Paris. The idea was to create an overview anatomical text along the Galenic model that would fix all the mistakes floating out there and provide evidence not just by argument but also through detailed illustrations.

De Fabrica was a sensation. It became a standard text almost immediately, and it secured Vesalius a position as a household physician to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. As exalted a position as this was, at a court that was a center of cultural and scientific patronage, as a member of the emperor’s household, Vesalius’ days as a professor were over, and, he thought, his days as an author were as well. He returned to Padua for a lecture attended by more than 500 students, but that was it. Over the protestations of his friends and colleagues, he also made the insane decision to burn his notes, unpublished works and much of his library, including copies of Galen he had extensively annotated.

He wasn’t quite done writing yet, though. His success at court led to a lucrative private practice in Brussels, and although he traveled with the emperor, in the first half of the 1550s he spent most of his time in his lavish home in Brussels which gave him the opportunity to work on a revision of De Fabrica. This wasn’t a superficial edit. Everything from the typography to the Latin grammar to the placement of the illustrations was made more elegant, more readable. The content was also substantively altered. The new edition would include corrections drawn from his experience at court, tending to war wounds and performing autopsies. The sections on female anatomy, previously heavily reliant on animal dissection, were completely rewritten based on his first-hand knowledge acquired from autopsying the cadavers of pregnant women. He was more secure in his disagreements with Galen and more reliant on his own personal experience rather than his book learning. The result was an edition that was fully rooted in and clearly stated its grounding in hands-on anatomical study of cadavers, that in no uncertain terms prioritized the evidence of scientific examination over the analysis of authorities.

The second edition of De Humani Corporis Fabrica was published in 1555. Vesalius died in 1564 on his way back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He was two months shy of his 50th birthday. No third edition was ever published, but it seems that in that nine year interim he had planned just that. A copy of the 1555 edition of De Fabrica was recently purchased by a German collector and it contains massive annotations in Vesalius’ hand.

Vesalius expert Vivian Nutton, Emeritus Professor of the History of Medicine at University College London, examined it last year and is the first to publish a study of the edition. At first he doubted that it was possible that a book of such massive significance, the basis of an unpublished third edition of De Fabrica, could exist without anybody knowing about it for four and a half centuries, but upon examination he has found it unquestionably authentic. You can download his paper about it, Vesalius Revised. His Annotations to the 1555 Fabrica, here (pdf).

The 1555 copy of De fabrica on deposit at the Fisher contains over a thousand interlinear and marginal annotations, in the form of additions, deletions and transpositions. There is scarcely a page that does not have some kind of revision on it.

In addition to the many stylistic changes, a good deal of anatomical information has been inserted or revised in light of Vesalius’s own studies and reading since 1555. An examination of the annotations leads inevitably to the conclusion that only Vesalius could have been their author.

Such a logical conclusion is supported by the forensic evidence provided by a comparison of Vesalius’s handwriting in a group of letters preserved at the University of Uppsala, with that in the notes in De fabrica. The case for Vesalius as annotator is incontrovertible.

Now the German collector has generously placed this volume on deposit at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library where it can be examined by scholars. Next year it will go on public display as part of an exhibit celebrating the 500th anniversary of Vesalius’ birth.

A painting of Queen Elizabeth I that portrays her in all her aging glory has recently been authenticated as in now on display at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. This version of Elizabeth eschews the alabaster smooth skin and preternaturally youthful look that characterize her portraits long after the bloom of her youth had faded. She has deep wrinkles, bags under eyes, a greyish skin tone underneath the blobs of blush.

She’s dignified and majestic in her posture and attire, but that wouldn’t have garnered the painter any favor with the queen. Realism was not her thing, and she started exerting control of her image from early in her reign. She was 30 years old and had been queen for just four years when she issued a Royal Proclamation in 1563 regulating the production of portraits. According to this proclamation, the Queen would approve one portrait of herself which would then be distributed to other painters to use as a template. That was fine when production was limited, but demand increased after Elizabeth’s excommunication in 1570 inspired a wave of patriotism. Displaying the portrait of Elizabeth was a way for everyone to declare support of queen and country.

The next decade would see war with Spain and the defeat of the Spanish Armada which engendered even greater peaks of patriotic fervor and even greater demand for images of the queen. It became impossible for all the portraits in circulation to be pre-approved. In 1596, the Privy Council took action against this state of affairs, ordering officers “to aid the Queen’s Sergeant Painter in seeking out unseemly portraits which were to her ‘great offence’ and therefore to be defaced and no more portraits to be produced except as approved by [the] Sergeant Painter.” Many paintings of Elizabeth were seized and burned.

One of the portraits to survive the conflagration, the 1592 Ditchley Portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, is one of the few surviving images of the queen which allows some small indications of her age. The newly revealed portrait has key elements in common with the Ditchley Portrait. The position and posture are the same, as are the hair jewels, necklace and lace collar. The faces are also similar, only one of them looks like she chose … poorly in that cave where the ancient crusader knight was guarding the Holy Grail.

The oil on panel portrait was purchased by Ruth Coltrane Cannon, founding member of the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, for $3,000 from a New York art dealer in the 1950s. If Mrs. Cannon or the dealer knew anything about its history, they left no evidence of it. She donated it to the Elizabeth Gardens, a botanical garden dedicated to the first British settlements in the New World founded by Sir Walter Raleigh during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. When the Gardens opened on August 18, 1960, the portrait of Elizabeth was hanging on the Gatehouse wall where it greeted visitors for 50 years.

The Gardens staff didn’t try to find out more about the painting until 2007. With growing scholarly interest in the portrait, in 2010 it was removed for conservation and then moved out of the Gatehouse permanently to a more secure, climate-controlled location. The materials in the paint and the wood panel and frame date it to the Elizabethan period. Experts now think it may have originated in the London studio of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger in the mid 1590s, although who commissioned it and which hand painted it remain unknown.

I wonder if it was a student piece. It doesn’t look complete to me. The lace on the collar, the relatively plain dress, that giant heart-shaped thing behind her are much sketchier in the Elizabeth Gardens portrait. The Ditchley Portrait was a popular model and several versions of it were made by the Gheeraerts studio. One iteration with an idealized younger face, simpler background and slightly different accessories was sent to Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, as an official diplomatic gift. It’s now in the Palazzo Pitti. Perhaps the Elizabeth Gardens version was a scrapped incomplete attempt which somehow got out into the world.

With its age confirmed, the portrait has left North Caroline for the first time in more than 50 years and is stepping into the national spotlight. It will feature on an upcoming episode of Treasure Detectives, a new appraisal and authentication program debuting on CNBC Tuesday, March 5th, at 9:00 PM. You can see it live at the Folger’s Nobility and Newcomers in Renaissance Ireland exhibit which examines the relationship between England and Ireland in the age of Shakespeare. It runs through May 19th.

Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) is leaving France for the first time since 1890 to go on display alongside her mentor, Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), in an exhibition at the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Manet: Return to Venice will run from April 24th to August 11th. It celebrates the influence of Italian Renaissance art on Manet and will feature more than 80 paintings and drawings that showcase how Manet’s visits to Italy inspired his work throughout his life.

Manet’s pieces will be placed next to the Italian works associated with them, most notably Olympia and Venus of Urbino. Art historians often speak of the two works in the same breath since Manet deliberately and recognizably used the Renaissance masterpiece as the model for his own boundary-busting exploration of the female nude. They have never met in the proverbial and copious flesh, though, because Olympia belongs to the France since Claude Monet, who the raised funds to buy it after Manet’s death, donated it to the state in 1890. It’s such an important watershed in modern painting that none of the museums that have hosted it (the Musée du Luxembourg from 1890 to 1907, the Louvre from 1907 to 1986, and the Musée d’Orsay from 1986 until the present) have ever allowed it to travel. Venus of Urbino is in the permanent collection of the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence and Italian regulations prohibit it from leaving the country.

This one-of-a-kind pairing was only made possible through the D’Orsay’s special collaboration with the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia. The French museum is loaning 42 of Manet’s works to the exhibit, an unprecedented number that will make up more than half the total pieces on display. Part of the motivation is fundraising as the D’Orsay will be making millions in loan fees, but museum president Guy Cogeval said, “It’s every art historian’s obsession to bring together these two great works of art, of which one served as a model for the other.”

Indeed they have more than a reclining nude subject in common. They both scandalized viewers, Manet’s from its first exhibition at the Paris Salon in 1865, Titian’s for several hundred years. Venus of Urbino was the first female nude of the era to be depicted reclining and with her eyes on the viewer. It was commissioned by Guidobaldo della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, in 1534, possibly as an instructional for his 16-year-old wife. Its eroticism was intended for private display and remained in the family until 1637 when Vittoria della Rovere brought it to Florence after her marriage to Ferdinand II of Tuscany, father of Cosimo III and grandfather of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici. The Venus was first placed in a public gallery in 1736, when Anna Maria had it placed in the Uffizi, but it was covered by an image of Sacred Love to keep it out of prurient view.

By the time Mark Twain visited the Uffizi in 1880, the Venus was no longer hidden, but it was still scandalous. Here’s how Twain described the painting in Chapter 50 of A Tramp Abroad:

You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallery that exists in the world — the Tribune — and there, against the wall, without obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses — Titian’s Venus. It isn’t that she is naked and stretched out on a bed — no, it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand.

He wasn’t being a prude so much as making a point about how explicit visual art was allowed to be even considering Victorian views towards public sexuality while anyone who described the Venus in words would be pilloried for obscenity, but he’s still shocked by the naked lady touching herself.

If I ventured to describe that attitude, there would be a fine howl — but there the Venus lies, for anybody to gloat over that wants to — and there she has a right to lie, for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges. I saw young girls stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic interest. How I should like to describe her — just to see what a holy indignation I could stir up in the world—just to hear the unreflecting average man deliver himself about my grossness and coarseness, and all that. The world says that no worded description of a moving spectacle is a hundredth part as moving as the same spectacle seen with one’s own eyes — yet the world is willing to let its son and its daughter and itself look at Titian’s beast, but won’t stand a description of it in words. Which shows that the world is not as consistent as it might be.

If Twain spluttered at Titian’s Venus of Urbino, by then 350 years old and a widely acknowledged masterpiece, critics went into full-on paroxysms over Manet’s Olympia when it debuted 15 years before Twain’s trip to Florence (a sound refutation of his contention that the visual arts got a pass when it comes to erotic content). Olympia was called every name in the book. Jules Claretie fulminated in Le Figaro: “What’s this yellow-bellied Odalisque, this vile model picked up who knows where, and who represents Olympia? Olympia? What Olympia? A courtesan, no doubt.” Viewers in the gallery flocked to express their hatred for it. Antonin Proust (no relation to Marcel), a journalist, politician and friend of Manet’s, wrote in his memoirs: “If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration,” namely hanging it far out of reach of canes. As Claretie put it, it was hung “at a height where even lousy paintings are never hung, above a gigantic door of the last room where it was hard to tell whether one was looking at a pile of naked flesh or a pile of linen.”

As it happens, Manet’s model was no courtesan but Victorine Meurent, who in addition to modeling for artists was a musician and painter in her own right. Titian’s, on the other hand, was. The model for Venus was Angela del Moro, a frequent dinner companion of Titian’s and the second-highest paid courtesan in Venice who was known for her refusal to fake orgasms. In the sensual environment of 16th century Venice, this was hardly a deficit.

Manet was depicting Victorine as a courtesan, however, while Titian, despite the sexual suggestiveness of the recumbent nude with her hand between her legs, was not. Venus is an idealized nude, her gaze direct but dreamy and her head turned down, resting demurely against her shoulder. She holds a nosegay of red roses, symbol of love, in one hand and the other hand is delicately poised against her inner thigh, covering her vulva even as it draws attention to it. Her little sleeping dog is a symbol of marital fidelity, and the maid hovering protectively over the young girl who digs through through the bridal hope chest in the background is a symbol of motherhood.

Olympia shares none of Venus idealized features and she is depicted as a demimondaine or courtesan. She reclines on a disheveled bed on top of a silk shawl, an orientalist image of luxurious decadence, wearing an orchid, a symbol of sexuality, in her hair while at her feet the loyal dog is replaced by a black cat with her tail in the air, a symbol of prostitution. Her gaze is direct and unflinching. Her hand doesn’t brush against her vulva like Venus‘ but rather blocks our view of it. She shows no interest in the massive flower arrangement, probably from a wealthy client, her servant brings her.

Manet’s style, the flat perspective, the broad, quick brushstrokes, the strong color contrasts and lack of smooth shading, was probably a large part of the fury directed at this painting. He was doing something new, something the classicists of the age weren’t ready to cope with, but that today has garnered Manet the title of the first modern painter, precursor to the Impressionists who would follow him.

Archaeologists surveying the construction site of the former City Hall in Rotterdam have unearthed a collection of 477 coins stuffed inside a 16th century shoe. The oldest coin in the hoard dates to 1472 and the most recent to 1592. The shoe, its leather still in quite good condition, is a 16th century style. Experts believe it was buried in 1592 or shortly thereafter, under the floorboards of a house by the owner, either as a standard savings practice (like the proverbial keeping your money in your mattress) or out of fear that they might be lost or stolen during turbulent times.

Most of the coins are Netherlands nickels, half pennies and double nickels. There are also English and Spanish pieces. At that time, foreign currency was just as usable as local coin. It was the quality and weight of the silver that counted. Some of the coins show signs of having been tested for value; they’ve been pierced to see if they’re real silver through and through. The total worth of the hoard in 1592 would have been around 50 guilders. To give you an idea of the buying power, a skilled craftsman earned a little less than one guilder a day, so this collection amounted to about two month’s pay.

The place where they were discovered was the location of a City Hall built after the destruction of the old one during World War II. It hasn’t been a private home in centuries, which makes the survival of the coin-filled shoe even more remarkable.

The late 16th century was a particularly rocky time for Rotterdam and the rest of the Netherlands. In 1568, the Seventeen Provinces (comprising all of today’s Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, plus bits of France and Germany) rebelled against the rule of the Spanish King Philip II. Religious conflict was the immediate catalyst. Philip was keen to enforce anti-heresy edicts in his heavily Protestant territories. Those territories were used to Charles V’s lax attitude; they didn’t appreciate having the Inquisition breathing down their necks. A burst of Iconoclastic fury by Dutch Calvinists in 1566 resulted in a brutal crackdown by the Duke of Alba, the Spanish military commander. A thousand people, among them nobles of the highest rank, were executed for treason.

William of Orange was supposed to be one of them, but he escaped and launched a revolt from Germany. Rotterdam sided with the rebellion in 1572 and became part of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands when the Dutch Low Countries seceded from the Spanish crown in 1581. Philip wasn’t going to let them go without a fight and a fight they got. Philip’s nephew, Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, successfully led the Spanish army to reclaim Belgium and the southern Netherlands in 1585 and put constant military pressure on Holland, at this point garrisoned by ineffectual British troops under Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth’s favorite.

The Dutch Republic’s fortunes improved with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and with Philip’s involvement in the French Civil War in 1589. Parma’s troops were spread too thin while the Dutch Army instituted revolutionary reforms which transformed it into an effective fighting force. In the early 1590s, the Dutch took the offensive, besieging Spanish-held cities with much success.

There was no official truce between the Republic and Spain until 1609. Fortunes shifted and anybody living in Holland during this period would have had good reason to hoard coin. Yet, such hoards are rare finds, and this is the first one that has ever been found in a shoe. Next up, Rotterdam’s Archaeological Research Center will clean the coins and study the find in more detail.

Here’s a nifty YouTube of the excavation. It’s all in Dutch and there are no subtitles, so if there’s any information in there I should add to this entry, please do let me know in the comments.

And now, a composition of my own, inspired by the nursery rhyme that immediately leaped to mind when I read this story. Throat clearing. One arm up in declamation position.

Thank you. Thank you very much.