The History Blog

A late 16th century portrait of Queen Elizabeth I has reveled over time and degradation that she was originally depicted holding a coiled serpent in her hand instead of the innocuous nosegay she holds now. When an earlier image that has been painted over begins to show through, that is known as a pentimento, which means repentance in Italian.

The portrait, painted by an unknown artist, some time in the 1580s or early 1590s, has not been on display at the National Portrait Gallery since 1921. You can clearly see the shadow of the serpent’s coming up from between her fingers and his tail coiling above her hand.

The serpent was a symbol of wisdom and reasoned judgment — as on the rod of Aesculapius, the physicians’ emblem — so that’s probably where our unknown artist was going with the imagery. He changed his mind, though (possibly in consideration of the common association of snakes with the devil and original sin), and quickly painted it over with a strangely-shaped but perfectly inoffensive little bouquet of roses.

Paint analysis shows that the snake was definitely made at the same time as the rest of the portrait. There is no varnish between the snake and flower layers, so we know it was painted right over.

The artist repented of his creation, if you will, and now the serpent is repenting him right back.

That’s not the only pentimento showing through, though. X-rays show that a portrait of an unknown woman lies underneath Elizabeth. Her head is higher and she’s facing the opposite way. If you click on the first picture at the top right of this entry, you can actually see her eye and nose in the left side of Elizabeth’s forehead and temple where the paint has chipped off. It looks like an absorbed twin.

Again the painter is unknown, but he’s definitely not the same person who would paint Elizabeth on the panel later. It’s very thoroughly painted but not quite complete. This lady is wearing a French hood, a garment fashionable from 1570 to 1580, so she might have been on the recycling heap for 10 to 20 years before getting royally repurposed.

The serpent portrait will go on display starting on March 13th along with 3 other interestingly altered paintings of Elizabeth I in an exhibit called Concealed and Revealed: The Changing Faces of Elizabeth I.

The four works range in date from the 1560s until just after her death in 1603. They were all modified in their time and have recently been re-examined using advanced scientific techniques of paint analysis, infrared and x-Ray photography so we can see more of what Elizabeth painters had hidden.

The most famous portrait of Elizabeth in the group, the Darnley portrait, originally showed the Queen with pink and rosy cheeks, so the image of the Virgin Queen always made up with white face and hands may turn out to be more of an artifact of faded paint than Elizabeth beauty standards.

Elizabethan audiences at The Globe and The Rose theaters gnoshed on oysters, mussels, hazelnuts, walnuts, pies and dried fruit while attending plays by the likes of Shakepeare and Marlowe.

The evidence has emerged from the most detailed study ever carried out on a Tudor or early Stuart playhouse. Archaeologists have been analysing the thousands of seeds, pips, stones, nutshell fragments, shellfish remains and fish and animal bones found on the site of the Rose Playhouse on London’s South Bank.

Museum of London Archaeology has just published the findings in The Rose and The Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, written by archaeologists Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller.

Bowsher and Miller found that there was an identifiable class component to what audiences ate. The standing crowd in the open area in front of the stage — felicitously referred to as “groundlings” or “stinkards” — mainly stuck with shellfish and nuts. In fact, the huge quantities of discarded hazelnut shells doubled as a kind of sawdust layer on the floor to absorb the many grossnesses of weather and population density.

Oysters remained a staple in the diet of London’s poor well into the Victorian period, Bowsher notes. Large quantities of oyster shells have been found in pretty much every excavation she’s done at the Museum of London Archaeology.

The covered gallery seats where the monied theater-goers gatheredl, on the other hand, show evidence of a more rarefied diet of crab, sturgeon and imported dried fruit like raisins, fig and peaches.

There are also remnants of New World contributions to Elizabethan culture, like pumpkin seeds and tobacco leavings. Sir Walter Raleigh had only introduced Virginia tobacco to England in 1578, but audiences at The Globe and The Rose seem to have been smoking pipes just 10 years later.

We know tobacco was being grown on the banks of Thames already, but we don’t actually know that it was Virginia tobacco, though. It could have been Latin American tobacco via Spain’s colonies which was introduced to Europeans right after Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Then years ago or so ago, Monseigneur David M. O’Connell, president of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., was looking for paper towels in the bathroom cabinet of his office when he found a strange bit of frame poking out under some junk. He pulled it out and found an etching that seemed familiar.

The name Rembrandt was on the back, but of course the Monseigneur had no way of knowing if it was genuine or a print or a copy.

In January of last year, Father O’Connell finally got around to asking the university’s records management archivist Leslie Knoblauch to have the etching appraised. While they were waiting to hear the results, CUA doctoral student Paul Wesley Bush translated the French inscription.

The etching measures 4.5 by 5 inches and has a paper backing that is crumbly and darkened with age. It bears a French inscription saying the picture is “the bust of an old man with a great beard seen about most of the face… His head a little perched gives him… the attitude of a man who sleeps,” according to [Paul Bush's translation].

In February the appraiser confirmed that it was the real deal: a genuine etching by Rembrandt. How it ended up with the paper towels in the bathroom cabinet, nobody knows.

Rembrandt was famous during his lifetime for his etchings. He made them by drawing with a needle on a resin-coated copper plate. The plate is dipped in acid which etches the needle lines into the plate.

Bush suggested they make an exhibit around the marvelous find, and so they have. “Fine Lines: Discovering Rembrandt and Other Old Masters at Catholic University” will be at the May Gallery in the John K. Mullen of Denver Memorial Library through May 24. Admission is free.

The current exhibit also features two engravings of Abraham Lincoln photos taken by famed Civil War-era photographer Mathew Brady: one by Scottish artist and engraver Alexander Hay Ritchie and the other by American John Chester Buttre, whose work includes a steel-plate engraving of a full-length portrait of President James Buchanan.

Additional exhibit pieces now on display at the May Gallery include a watercolor copy of a print of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein; two black-and-white engravings by English artist William E.C. Morgan; and six woodcut prints by Julius John Lankes, an American artist whose works are included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the British Museum.

One of the rarest of all maps, the Ricci World Map of 1602, is going on display as part of the Library of Congress’ “Exploring the Early Americas” map exhibit. Unveiled today, it will remain there until April 10 when it will move to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for a short exhibit, then to its permanent home, the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.

This map is one of only two in good condition. Its rarity, important representation of the meeting of East and West and its Chinese annotations have earned it a lovely romantic moniker among collectors: the Impossible Black Tulip. There are a handful other copies in the Vatican library, in a private collection in France and in public collections in Japan.

This particular copy was sold by a Japanese collector to the the James Ford Bell Trust for a cool million dollars, the second highest price ever paid for a map. The highest price is $10 million, paid by the Library of Congress for the 1507 Waldseemüller World Map, the first to use the name “America”. The Waldseemüller map is currently on display right next to the Ricci in the Library of Congress exhibit.

The Ricci World Map was drawn by Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci at the request of Emperor Wanli. It’s the first Chinese map to show the Americas, and it’s huge with all kinds of detailed annotations. The notes next to North America mention “humped oxen” (aka bison) and the northernmost “Ka-na-ta” region. It’s composed of six rice paper panels totaling 5.5 feet in height, 12.5 feet in width. The panels were designed to be mounted on a folding screen.

Although Ricci never actually met the Emperor, he did impress him enough with a gift of a chiming clock that in 1601 he became the first Westerner ever invited into the Forbidden City. When he died in 1610, the Emperor granted him a special dispensation to be buried in Beijing rather than in Macao where all foreigners were by law to be buried.

Unfortunately this is the biggest picture I could find of the entire map, but the Library of Congress plans to upload detailed images of it to its excellent site after the exhibit is over.

Mayor of Bologna Flavio Delbono announced Tuesday that the city will be reopening one of the canals in the historic center of the city.

The canal system, built between the 12th and 16th centuries to accommodate the ever-increasing transportation needs of the city with the oldest university in Europe (founded in 1088), was paved over by roads and parking lots in the post-war boom of the 1950s. You can still catch a glimpse of bits and bobs of the old canals, but they’d long since been superseded by cars.

Now choked by smog and perpetually overshadowed as a tourist attraction by its more famous neighbors Milan, Florence and Venice, Bologna is looking to beautify and reinvigorate the historic center.

A parking lot and part of the road would be torn up between Via Riva Reno and Via Galliera, revealing not only the water underneath but also the remains of an Ancient Roman bridge. The two banks of the canal would be connected by a footbridge, while cars would have the use of one side of the waterway. While Bologna is unlikely to ever rival Venice, said Delbono, more waterways will be uncovered if this first stage goes well, and Bologna could eventually join the ranks of Europe’s major rediscovered ”canal cities”, such as Strasbourg, Bruges and Birmingham. He said the waterways would not only make the historic centre more pleasant for Bolognesi, they would also boost tourism and could even be used for commercial activities.

No start date was announced, but this initital phase should take about 18 months. If it’s successful, other canals might follow. That’s a big if, though, because like every old city in Europe, car traffic is a major issue so the loss of street and parking space could turn out to be more of a city planning headache than the canals are an advantage.

If it does work out, there are 5 main canals still running underneath of the streets of Bologna which could be revealed one at a time. The Navile had its own port and linked Bologna to the major thoroughfare of the Po river. The Reno and the Savena brought water to the city and the other canals. The Cavaticcio and Moline powered grain and silk mills. Bologna was famed for its silk industry, considered the height of European silk production technology from the 15th century to the 18th.

You can actually tour these underground canals now, as well as some tunnels from Bologna’s rich Roman and Etruscan past. Bologna has been a major city since it was called Felsina under the Etruscans in the 6th century B.C.

Bologna is also famously progressive. It was the first city in Europe to abolish serfdom in 1256, and it was the only Italian city in the 15th century that allowed women to practice any profession, some could even get a degree from the university.

Here’s a stolen Holy Mother and Child with a happy ending, for a change. Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder was stolen from the walls of Drumlanrig Castle on August 23, 2003. Four men joined a tour group visiting the castle, then lagged behind the rest of the ground and overpowered the security guard who was guarding the painting. They hustled it into a waiting car and got away, discarding the frame just outside the castle walls.

It is one of the few Leonardos in private hands and the only Leonardo in Scotland. The 9th Duke of Buccleuch took it with him wherever he went. Needless to say, he was devastated by the theft. The painting had been in his family for generations.

Then, out of the blue, 4 years later the painting turned up in a Glasgow law office. Unfortunately, the 9th Duke died just a few weeks before the Madonna was found.

Valued in the region of £50 million, the work, owned by the Buccleuch Heritage Trust, was considered so important that it was placed on the FBI’s list of the world’s ten most wanted stolen artworks.

“One very much hoped we would see it again,” said [director Michael] Clarke. “Very often these great works do come back — though not always, sadly — and they are recovered often through clever police work. I know it was extremely upsetting for the previous Duke of Buccleuch. I know he was really, really knocked back by this theft. It is a pity the recovery did not come in time for him to enjoy it.”

Michael Clarke is the person who authenticated the work after the police found it. He had been there in 1992 when the 9th Duke had loaned it to the National Gallery for display, so he knew right away it was the real deal.

The 10th Duke asked the conservators of the National Gallery to cared for it after it was returned. They carefully examined it for damage — there was none, thankfully — and reframed it. Now the 10th Duke has now lent it to the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it takes pride of place in the Old Masters gallery.

From a letter by a contemporary of Leonardo’s, we know he was painting it for Florimond Robertet, a French diplomat. Leonardo was less than reliable at completing his commissions, however, so we don’t know if Robertet ever got the painting.

We also don’t know how much of it was painted by the master’s hand. His studio filled in a lot of blanks when he got behind on his delivery dates. In this case, the overall design, the figures and the rocks in the foreground all appear to be Leonardo’s. The background was likely added, possibly quite a bit later, by another artist or artists.

Eight men have been with the theft. They are scheduled to go on stand trial next year. Apparently they didn’t even know its real value. They were just using it as collateral for drug deals, the bastards.

One of Caravaggio’s last paintings (painted in 1609, a year before he died), the Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence, was stolen from the oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo in 1969. Despite many appeals from authorities, scholars and art lovers at the time and since, the painting has never been recovered.

The meager hope, if it can be called that, was that the theft had been commissioned by a mafia don and the painting was hanging in some private collection, possibly to turn up after a death or search warrant or trial.

Those hopes both flickered and dimmed in the mid-80’s when during the trial of former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti a heroin dealer and mafioso named Francesco Marino Mannoia said he’d been one of the thieves in 1969. According to him, they damaged the painting in removing it from the frame, and the private collector who commissioned the theft wept at the sight of it.

Still, that was better than some of the other theories, like that it was moved to Naples and destroyed in the 1980 earthquake or left the country alltogether. Now a former mafia hitman who has turned state’s evidence says he heard from his boss 10 years ago about the sad fate of the masterpiece.

Gaspare Spatuzzo, who was imprisoned in 1997 on multiple counts of murder and turned informer last year, has told magistrates that Filippo Graviano, a Mafia boss for whom he was a hitman, told him in 1999 in prison that the painting was destroyed in the 1980s.

He said that Graviano, who with his brother Giuseppe Graviano ran one of the most powerful Cosa Nostra clans, had told him that the painting, said to be worth at least £20 million [$32 million], was handed for safe keeping to the Pullara family, part of the Santa Maria di Gesu clan in Palermo, who hid it in a farm outbuilding. “There it was eaten by rats and pigs, and so was burnt,” Spatuzza said.

There’s no way to confirm the story, of course, so there’s still a chance the Nativity could be hidden away somewhere instead of destroyed, but I’m afraid it’s a slim one.

Diane de Poitier was King Henry II’s mistress in the 16th century. She was a renown beauty, athletic and intelligent. She kept Henry’s interest until his death, despite being 20 years older than him.

Perhaps that age difference is one of the reasons she seems to have sought an elixir of youth from apothecaries. Unfortunately for Diane, said apothecaries held to the alchemical principle that gold is the immutable and perfect element. If you want to retain your youthful perfection, therefore, ingesting some form of gold would seem to be the way to go.

A contemporary of hers historian, soldier and biographer Pierre de Bourdeille, said she was beautifully pale even without makeup, that she looked 30 when she was twice that age and took a daily dose of gold to achieve this remarkable effect. It’s only recently that anyone has been able to use modern chemical analysis to confirm his story.

Diane de Poitier died in her chateau Anet in 1566. She was buried in an elaborate tomb in a funeral chapel, but her remains were removed and thrown into a pit outside the chateau walls during the French Revolution.

Last year some of her bones were found, confirmed as hers by a healed united fracture of the tibia and fibula which she was known to have sustained during a riding accident in 1565. The remaining jaw bone also matched perfectly the last portrait of her from the school of François Clouet.

Now French scientists have analyzed tissue and hair remnants and found an extremely high concentration of gold, 500 times greater than in a lock of hair from her younger days preserved at the chateau. She didn’t wear crowns or gold fabric every day so the gold wasn’t externally applied. They also found her bones were fragile — unexpectedly so for an athletic woman who swam and rode daily — and her hair was thin and brittle. Both of those are symptoms of gold poisoning.

The British Medical Journal which has published the study has an informative video about Diane de Poiters and her gold habit here. Much to my disappointment, the BMJ is not immune to the tedious trend of historical reenactments cluttering up a documentary, but there’s a lot of great info about the science in amidst shadowy scenes of Diane looking in mirrors or visiting an alchemist.

Sir Anthony van Dyck’s last self-portrait sold for a record-breaking £8,329,250 ($13,521,704) at a Sotheby’s auction today. Nine bidders drove the price for this rare masterpiece far above the £2-3 million estimate, and far above the previous record of £3.06m for his A Rearing Stallion sold by Christie’s in July of last year.

The winning bid was made by Alfred Bader in partnership with Philip Mould.

Art dealer Philip Mould said buying the portrait was an “opportunity we could not miss”.

Mr Mould added: “This is the most important 17th-Century British portrait to come on the market in the last two decades. It was an opportunity we could not miss.”

Considering that the last time it was on the market was in 1712, I can see his point. It first belonged to artist Sir Peter Lely. In 1712, it was bought by Sir Francis Child, a London banker whose descendant married the 5th Earl of Jersey. The portrait has remained in the Earl of Jersey family ever since.

Van Dyck painted the portrait in London in 1640, just a few months before he died. It’s one of only 3 self-portraits he made in England and it’s a fabulous one. He’s wearing a styling black and white slashed silk doublet and looking over his slashed sleeves at the viewer.

Born in 1599, Van Dyck was something of a child prodigy. His artistic talent was evident at a very early age and he was already studying under a professional artist when he was a mere 10 years old. He started his own studio with fellow child prodigy Jan Brueghel the Younger when he was 15.

He was just 42 when he died.

In 1998 raging fire devastated the interior of thousand-year-old Saxon church St. Brandon’s in Brancepeth, England. Temperatures reached 1200° Celsius at the height of the conflagration, melting the lead from the roof and virtually vaporizing the beautifully carved wooden interior.

The massive oak beams from the roof were the only remaining wood, and they too were so charred they may or not be datable via dendrochronology (tree ring dating).

Amidst the tragic loss, something wonderful was found: more than a thousand medieval gravestones stored in the walls of the church hundreds of years ago.

Cross slabs are the size of a coffin lid and are engraved with full-size crosses as well as designs indicating the profession or status of the deceased. A housewife is represented by shears, for instance, a priest by a chalice, a knight by a sword, a scholar by a book. Several of St. Brandon’s cross slabs include symbols not found anywhere else, like an intricate 5-point cross.

It was common practice at the time to reuse old stone from elsewhere in the church to reinforce the walls, so many of these cross slabs were used as internal lintels for the clerestory windows.

They weigh up to half a ton each and they date from between 1100 and 1300 A.D. A local historian thinks they might have been intentionally secreted in the clerestory to keep them safe from Puritan reformers.

Jim Merrington, of the Brancepeth History and Archive Group, explained: “After the roof burned off we discovered a ring of cross slabs high up around the perimeter of the clerestory which was built in 1638 by Rector John Cosin, who later became Bishop of Durham. All were neatly placed facing skywards. It is possible that Cosin had them gathered up from the churchyard and secreted them away on the very top course of the building safe from vandals and reformists. It was obviously quite a task to get them up there for no real structural purpose.”

Archaeologist Peter Ryder said the collection of cross slabs was the biggest in the North, and possibly the second largest in the country after a collection at Bakewell, Derbyshire.

Twenty of the cross slabs are now on display on the church walls. Another 40 will be exhibited at nearby Brancepeth Castle.