The History Blog

To nobody’s surprise, the beautiful and historic “Beau Sancy” diamond has sold for more than double the high pre-sale estimate at Sotheby’s Geneva Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels sale. The 35-carat modified pear double rose cut gemstone, which since the early 17th century has successively been part of the crown jewels of France, Holland, England, Prussia and the German Empire, was purchased by an anonymous telephone bidder for $9.7 million including buyer’s premium.

The diamond first entered the historical record in 1570 when it was purchased in Constantinople by diplomat, financier and jewel expert Nicolas de Harlay, Lord of Sancy. It was purchased by Henri IV of France for his wife Marie de Medici in 1604. From then until now, the “Beau Sancy” has never been in non-royal hands (as long as you consider the sellers, the House of Hohenzollern, still royal, even though their last scion to sit on a throne was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany).

Five bidders from North America, Europe and Asia vied for the “Beau Sancy” and one of them won. Sotheby’s won’t disclose any more information than that, so sadly this probably means a stone that has been at the center of European royal history for more than 400 years has now been sucked into the black hole of private collections never to be seen again until the next public sale.

Perhaps we’ll get lucky and the buyer will loan it to the Louvre so it can be put on display in the Apollo Gallery along with its cousin the “Sancy” diamond, a 53-carat pale yellow shield-shaped modified brilliant cut that was once the center stone of the fleur-de-lis on top of Louis XV’s coronation crown. The “Sancy” was replaced by a replica in 1729 at the king’s command, and the Revolution and later French Republics looted, dispersed and sold the originals. After many vicissitudes, including decades of being hidden away in anonymous private collections, the “Sancy” found its way back home again when William Waldorf Astor, 4th Viscount Astor, sold it to the Louvre for one million dollars in 1978. So there’s hope that like its cousin, the “Beau Sancy” might end up in a museum, even though it could take a few centuries.

See the catalogue notes on Sotheby’s website for more details about the fascinating history of the “Beau Sancy” diamond. I found the information about the connection between the light-giving symbolism of royalty and the newly-invented cut particularly interesting:

The fact that the Beau Sancy was first worn by Marie de Medici in 1610 as the principle [sic] stone and centrepiece of her coronation crown indicates very clearly the importance of the diamond at this time as the supreme emblem of Royalty. On a symbolic level, diamonds are associated with the sun, our “Daystar”, the dynamic centre of our cosmos and thus the source of all life and light. What better stone therefore could be used to illustrate the parallel with the position and central role of the Monarch within his Kingdom? Indeed, later the same century, King Louis XIV would go a step further and call himself “Le Roi Soleil”.

The Beau Sancy, which was cut and polished towards the end of the 16th century, exhibits the first attempts to liberate the ‘fire’ inherent in the stone – a property of diamond so familiar and so admired today, but which, due to the absolute hardness of the crystal which rendered cutting so difficult, had only just begun to be exploited. By the use of the newly-developed ‘rose’ style of cutting, which employed a myriad of triangular facets covering the entire surface of the crystal, the light which entered the stone was reflected and dispersed, broken up on the way into the colours of the rainbow. This was totally new.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Owen Johnson was looking at a hole dug by builders in his back yard in the town of High Ackworth, near Pontefract, West Yorkshire, last summer when he saw the rim of a ceramic pot sticking out of the dirt. He tried to dig it out, but it split in two and a torrent of gold and silver coins spilled out “like a slot machine,” as the good doctor put it. The final tally was almost 600 gold and silver coins dating to the 1640s and a gold ring inscribed, “When this you see, remember me.”

The coins were buried near what look like the remains of an old post, so Dr. Johnson believes the treasure might have been buried by a worried Royalist hiding his worldly goods from marauding Parliamentarians during the Civil War. The coins have a total face value of £85 ($135), the equivalent in today’s spending power of about £7,000 ($11,000). (The UK National Archives website has an awesome historical currency and buying power converter.) Of course their historical value is much higher, and probably the plain precious metal weight is too.

As expected, the coins and ring have been declared official treasure, at the coroner’s inquest at Wakefield Coroner’s Court on Tuesday. Since they are precious metals older than 300 years, according to the 1996 Treasure Act the artifacts are now property of the Crown. The next step is to assess their market value. Museums will then be given first bite at the apple, but they have to raise the money to secure the treasure. The money is usually split between the finder and the property owner, who in this case are the same person.

Local government officials are hoping the coins and ring will stay in the area, perhaps on display at the Pontefract Museum.

Dr Johnson said: “Pontefract Museum is very interesting but it could do with some highlights and this would definitely be a highlight, which would be good because Pontefract’s history is sometimes undervalued.”

Lisa Dodd, Wakefield Council’s service director for sport and culture, added: “We believe these items have been in our district since the 1600s, making them a real part of this district’s rich history. It would be a great shame to not do all we can to try and keep the treasure in its rightful home for future generations to enjoy.

“The Wakefield district has a superb, nationally renowned heritage and Pontefract Museum would be a fitting home for the treasure.”

Pontefract played an important role during the Civil War. Pontefract Castle, a powerful ducal stronghold since the Norman invasion and the place where King Richard II was imprisoned and died after his forced abdication, was besieged by Parliamentarian forces no fewer than three times between 1644 and 1649. Cromwell described it thus after the second siege:

[Pontefract Castle] is very well-known as one of the strongest inland garrisons in the kingdom; well-watered; situated on rock in every part of it; and therefore difficult to mine. The walls are very thick and high, with strong towers; and if battered, very difficult of access, by reason of the depth and steepness of the graft.

He knew whereof he spoke. Pontefract Castle would prove to be literally the last Royalist line of defense. Pontefract was still fighting for the Royalist cause for months after the war ended everywhere else. The third siege began in August of 1648. It was still going strong on January 30th, 1649, when King Charles I was beheaded. The Rump Parliament that had executed the king for treason declared the monarchy abolished on February 7th.

The Royalist garrison at Pontefract Castle simply proclaimed the regicided king’s son King Charles II and fought on in his name for almost two months. They even minted coins in the name of King Charles II, inscribed with the motto “Post mortem patris pro filio” meaning “After the death of the father, support the son.” The castle finally fell on March 24th, 1649, and was demolished by Parliament that summer. Only ruins remain now.

After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Pontefract made “Post mortem patris pro filio” its official motto which it remains to this day.

Katie Taylor, the house steward of National Trust estate Dunham Massey, was going through a folio of letters in storage when she unexpectedly came across two royal letters, one from King Henry VIII, the other from his third wife Jane Seymour. Most of the letters kept in the home were transferred to the John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester after the last Earl of Stamford died in 1976 bequeathing the estate to the National Trust. Taylor was almost sure she recognized the signatures as those of Henry and Jane, but to be certain the National Trust called in an expert from John Rylands Library to examine them. He confirmed that they are indeed genuine.

Taylor notes that the letters are in excellent condition, a notable feat given that they were written decades before the first Dunham Massey house was built. They were written on thick, strong paper and stored flat for centuries. Obviously generations of Dunham families treasured them and kept them safe.

The letter from Henry VIII was written on February 10th, 1543 to George Booth, Esq., the grandfather of the Sir George Booth who built the first Dunham Massey estate in 1600. In it the king exhorts Booth to draft all the men he can muster to fight against the Scots who have done Henry, Britain and his people “manifold injuries, wrongs and displeasures.” Booth is to count the final numbers of cavalry, archers, billmen (infantry bearing hooked polearms called bills) and all other stand-out fighters then write to Henry Radclyffe, the Earl of Sussex and the king’s second cousin, letting him know exactly what forces he can expect Booth to bring him.

The full text of the letter transcribed in modern English:

By the King

Trusty and well-beloved we greet you well, letting you know that forasmuch as by the manifold injuries, wrongs and displeasures done unto us, our realm and our subjects by the Scots, we have been forced lately to enter into open war and hostility with the same, which we intend and purpose, god willing (unless the nobles of Scotland conform themselves to reason), to prosecute with such force as shall redound to our honour and to the commonwealth of our realm and subjects. To the intent that we may better know the forces of our said realm and thereby put the same in such order and readiness as they may serve us in this enterprise as the case shall require, we have thought meet and necessary to have special musters taken of all our people and thereupon to have all such plan and perfect certificate made as shall declare what be trusted to in that behalf. Wherefore our pleasure and commandment is that you, by virtue and authority hereof, shall with all convenient diligence take the musters of all the able men, both horsemen and footmen, which you can make and furnish, both of our tenants inhabiting upon farms, holdings and tenancies within any office under us of which you have the stewardship, if you have any such, and also of your own servants and tenants dwelling upon your own tenancies. And the same so taken, to certify in writing to our right trusty and right entirely beloved cousin and counsellor the Duke of Sussex, lieutenant general in the northern areas, with all possible diligence, with a special note and declaration to be expressed in the said certificate, how many of the said persons are furnished with horses able to occupy [carry] a spear or javelin, how many are archers and how many billmen, and how many principal men may be picked out of every sort of the whole number. Forcing [taking care] that in these musters and certificate you do not meddle in any way with any mariners, forasmuch as we intended to reserve the same of our furniture by sea [i.e. navy], and that you put all the same readiness as they [to] set forth in one hour’s warning, whenever you receive commandment from our said cousin in that behalf. And these our letters shall be your sufficient warrant and discharge herein accordingly. Given under our signet [seal] at our Palace of Westminster the 10th day of February, the 34th year of our reign.

The second letter was written on behalf of Queen Jane Seymour and is a birth announcement. It’s dated October 12th, 1537, the actual birth day of Henry’s only (legitimate) son, the future Edward VI, and was not written by Jane herself. She was in no state to be writing birth announcements after two days and three nights of labor, nor would she ever be again. She died just 12 days later, probably from an infection contracted during childbirth.

The full text of her letter in modern English:

By the Queen

Trust and well beloved, we greet you well. And forasmuch as by the inestimable goodness and grace of Almighty God, we have been delivered and brought to child-bed of a Prince conceived in most lawful matrimony between my lord, the King’s Majesty, and us, doubting not but that for the love and affection which you bear unto us and the commonwealth of this realm the knowledge of which you should be joyous and glad tidings unto you, we have thought good to certify you of the same, to the intent that you might not only render unto God condign thanks and praise for so great benefit, but also pray for the long continuance and preservation of the same here in this life to the honour of God, joy and pleasure of my lord the King and us, and the universal peace, quiet and tranquility of this whole realm. Given under our Signet at my lord’s manor of Hampton Court, the 12th day of October.

Both letters are now on display at Dunham Massey as part of its new “Faithful and Obedient” exhibition, which, in honor of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee year, documents the history of relations between the English monarchs and the Dunham Massey families. The exhibit is open from Saturdays to Wednesdays, 11 AM – 5 PM.

Georg Friedrich Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, head of the Imperial House of Hohenzollern and great-great-grandson of Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser of Germany, is selling a diamond that has been part of the crown jewels of France, Holland, England, Prussia and the German Empire. Known as the “Beau Sancy,” the 35-carat modified pear double rose cut diamond is thought to have been mined near the south-central Indian city of Golconda, the same mines that produced the Hope Diamond.

It was purchased in 1570 in Constantinople by diplomat, financier and famed jewel expert Nicolas de Harlay, Lord of Sancy. Harlay also owned a 55.23-carat shield-shaped yellow diamond called the “Sancy” so the smaller, whiter gem came to be called the “Beau Sancy” or “Little Sancy” to distinguish it from its cousin. An avid monarchist, Harlay sold high-end gems to raise money for King Henry III of France’s wars. He loaned both Henry III and Henry IV the “Sancy” diamond. The former king borrowed it to wear on the cap he used to cover his baldness; the latter used it as collateral to finance yet another war.

Harlay owned both spectacular stones for decades, entering into years of negotiations with potential buyers like the Duke of Mantua which went nowhere. He finally sold the “Sancy” to King James I of England around 1604. Legend has it that when Marie de’ Medici, wife of King Henry IV of France, found out that the biggest Sancy stone was now in the clutches of the English monarchy, she was so furious that Henry bought the “Beau Sancy” to appease her. He gave it to her as a gift.

Marie had it set at the top of the crown she wore at her coronation on May 13, 1610. There’s a formal portrait of Marie in full coronation regalia by Frans Pourbus the Younger in the Louvre which depicts the “Beau Sancy” at the apex of her crown. Unfortunately for Marie, on May 14, 1610, her husband was assassinated. Marie was made regent for her eight-year-old son, Louis XIII, and was by all accounts awful at it. Louis had to claim his own throne by force in 1617 and exile his mom to French hinterlands.

She kept intriguing against Louis’ rule and against his puppet master/advisor Cardinal Richelieu in various countries for the next 25 years. In 1641 she was in Amsterdam and deep in debt. To pay off some of her creditors, Marie de’ Medici sold the “Beau Sancy” to Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange-Nassau, for a staggering 80,000 florins, the single largest expenditure in the state budget for that year.

Prince Frederick Henry’s grandson William III of Orange inherited the stone. He gave it to his wife Mary as a wedding gift. After Catholic King James II of England was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the couple ascended the throne of England as King William III and Queen Mary II. They brought the “Beau Sancy” with them to England, and James II took the “Sancy” with him when he fled to France. Broke and dependent on his cousin King Louis XIV, James II sold the “Sancy” to Richelieu’s protégé Cardinal Mazarin who in turn left it to the Sun King in his will. The “Sancy” disappeared during the French Revolution but reappeared on the market in 1828, going through various hands until it was sold to the Louvre in 1978 by William Waldorf Astor, 4th Viscount Astor.

Meanwhile, William and Mary died childless, so after their deaths the “Beau Sancy” went to another grandson of Prince Frederick Henry’s, Frederick III, Elector Prince of Brandenburg and as of 1701, King Frederick I of Prussia. The diamond was considered the most important stone in the crown jewels and was worn by every royal bride until the dissolution of the monarchy after World War I. When Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated as German Emperor and King of Prussia and fled to the Netherlands in November 1918, the diamond stayed in Berlin.

It was kept in a sealed crypt for safekeeping during World War II. British troops discovered the stone after the war and returned it to the House of Hohenzollern where it has remained ever since. On May 14, “Beau Sancy” will be put on the auction block at the Sotheby’s Geneva Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels sale.

The diamond will tour the world before then, stopping at Sotheby’s showrooms in Hong Kong, New York, Rome, Paris, London and Zurich before arriving at its destination in Geneva. “Beau Sancy” has only been on public display four times over the past 50 years, so it’s a rare opportunity. Who knows where it will end up after it’s sold. Philipp Herzog von Württemberg, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, expressed a hope that the French government would buy the stone so the two historic Sancy diamonds could be together again at the Louvre, but I suspect that’s a pipe dream. The pre-sale estimate is $2 million – $4 million. I suspect those numbers are a pipe dream too.

Divers have discovered a Spanish shipwreck from 1583 off the coast of Brazil’s southern Santa Catarina state. Although they haven’t found any remains including the name of the ship, they did find a triangular plaque engraved with the date 1582 and King Philip II of Spain’s name. They also discovered a stone shield bearing the heraldic symbol of the Iberian Union, the dynastic union of the monarchies of Spain and Portugal that united the entire Iberian peninsula south of the Pyrenees under a single crown (the Spanish one).

Archaeologists believe that the triangular plaque would have been used as a marker to claim any newly discovered lands. The Iberian Union was established in 1580. Contemporary documents reference a ship going down on January 7, 1583 off the coast of Santa Catarina, so even without the ship name there is solid evidence that the wreck dates to the early 1580s. If the 1583 date is confirmed, this will be the oldest shipwreck ever found in Brazil.

The recovered pieces and the documentary review indicate the wreck was a supply ship for a fleet that left Spain in 1581 on a mission to build two forts on the Strait of Magellan to stymie the advance of English pirates menacing Madrid’s territories in the New World.

Starting March 14th, divers will return to the site to bring back as many artifacts as they can find, visibility and currents depending. On previous dives they saw a cannon, ballast stones, cannonballs and ceramic fragments which the team hopes to recover on the upcoming underwater expedition.

The Portuguese had landed on the Island of Santa Catarina, the island which today contains most of state capital Florianópolis, in 1514, but they didn’t colonize it until the next century. It was Spain who first began to use it as a base for trade and further exploration just a decade later.

In 1525, Charles I of Spain ordered the friar García Jofre de Loaísa to take a fleet of seven ships and 450 men, sailors plus tradesmen and clerical staff, westward to reach the far east. The expedition’s immodest brief was to cross the Atlantic Ocean, the Strait of Magellan and the Pacific Ocean to reach the Spice Islands (today part of Indonesia). Don Rodrigo de Acuña, captain of the fourth ship, stopped at Santa Catarina Island and left 17 of his crew behind before continuing on towards the Strait.

I don’t know what their fate was, but it can’t have gone much worse than the Loaísa expedition which shed ships and people like a husky sheds undercoat in the summer. Only four ships reached the Pacific, and only one, the Santa Maria de Parral, reached the Spice Islands in 1526 carrying the captain, Andrés de Urdaneta, and 24 of his men. They were captured by the Portuguese for their trouble but eventually made it back to Spain in 1528, thus completing the second circumnavigation of the globe in history.

The first permanent European settlement on Santa Catarina Island was established by Spanish colonists in 1542. The island was used as a supply port by Spanish ships headed towards the Rio de la Plata estuary that today lies on the border between Uruguay and Argentina. The Portuguese took over in 1673, gradually colonizing the island and the mainland coastline. By the late 1670s, the settlement that would become Florianópolis was beginning to grow.

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.

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.

Okay, so you weren’t able to get to England or sell your kidney to buy a scalped ticket for the sold out blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition at London’s National Gallery. For the many of us all over the world in that sad boat, we will have to content ourselves with a viewing of an HD documentary on the exhibit: Leonardo Live (which isn’t live for us but was broadcast live originally).

Captured live on November 8, 2011, LEONARDO LIVE provides a virtual walk-through of the exhibit, with exclusive commentary from scholars and curators. Hosted by highly respected art historian Tim Marlow and presenter Mariella Frostrup, the exhibition brings together the largest number of da Vinci’s rare surviving painting and some international loans. While numerous exhibitions have looked at da Vinci as an inventor, scientist or draughtsman, this is the first to be dedicated to his aims and techniques as a painter.

When I last blogged about this, the screening dates hadn’t been published yet. Now they have and you can buy your tickets in advance. It opens in 450 theaters around the country on February 16. Since most of the screenings are a one-night-one-showing-only event, I suggest you book early. You can plug your zip code into this site to get a listing and map of the theaters nearest to you that are showing the movie.

For some fascinating background on the Herculean effort it took to put together this unprecedented exhibit, read this article from the Telegraph. It took five years from idea to exhibition, and it would never have happened if Queen Elizabeth II hadn’t agreed up front to allow Luke Syson, the National Gallery’s curator of Italian paintings before 1500, to offer loans of important Leonardo drawings from the Royal Collection in return for loans of Leonardo paintings.

So Syson started by negotiating the loan of the Lady with an Ermine from the Czartoryski Foundation in Cracow. Next he asked his colleagues at the Louvre for La Belle Ferronnière. With two such stunning portraits secured for the show, it would have been hard for Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan to turn down his request for Leonardo’s Portrait of a Musician, because with the addition of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks it looked like every surviving picture painted by Leonardo in Milan would be in the show.

Every picture he painted in Milan (the frescoes in the Castello Sforzesco and The Last Supper excluded, of course, on account of they’re attached to walls) is fully half the total number of the Leonardo paintings known to survive.