The History Blog

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.

A team of Spanish maritime historians will build a full-size, seaworthy replica of the San Juan, a Basque whaling galleon that sank near the shore of Red Bay, Labrador, in the autumn of 1565. The wreck of the 52-foot, three-masted, 250-ton ship was discovered in 1978 by Parks Canada divers working on clues unearthed in documents found in Valladolid and Oñate by federal archivist Selma Huxley Barkham. It’s the oldest shipwreck ever discovered in Canadian waters and an invaluable source of information about Basque shipping in general and the Basque presence in Canada in particular.

Canadian archaeologists will meet with Spanish experts this week to share all the information on the ship’s construction they’ve accumulated over the decades.

“Right from the start, we thought this was a really, really great idea,” said Marc-André Bernier, Parks Canada’s chief of underwater archeology. “For archeologists, this is basically the ultimate final product. You’re taking all of the research from a site that’s been excavated, then you take it to the maximum in experimental archeology,” physically recreating “what is lost.”

The replica will take several years to build. It’s scheduled to be up and running by 2016 in time to be a part of the celebrations in the Basque city of San Sebastian which has been designated by the Europe Council of the European Union as a European Capital of Culture for 2016. San Sebastian is on the southern coast of the Bay of Biscay and was an important capital of shipping during the Middle Ages and Age of Discovery. Many of the whaling expeditions to Labrador (known as the Carrera de Terranova or Newfoundland Run) in the 16th century departed from San Sebastian and were funded by its financiers.

The Terranovan whaling voyages were as profitable as the Carrera de Indias (Indies Run) which transported massive quantities of gold and silver to Spain. The earliest Spanish records on Labrador whaling date to the 1540s and they document extensive trade in “lumera” (whale oil used for lamps which burned brighter than vegetable oils), and blubber that was used in the construction of ships, the manufacture of soap, pharmaceutical products and in the textile industry. The Basque shipping industry had extensive experience in whaling closer to home, so when the new market opened in the New World, their expertise ensured big profits from day one. Even during war between France and Spain and outbreaks of piracy in the 1550s, Basque ships carried whale products to England, Flanders and Spain.

An average of 15 Basque ships a year did the Labrador-Europe run, each of them carrying at least 1,000 400-pound barrels of whale oil and blubber. That’s a conservative estimate. Many years production exceeded 15,000 barrels per year. The number of whales killed in the Strait of Belle Isle averaged 20 per ship. The San Juan was carrying almost 1,000 barrels of whale oil when she went down. Most of that was salvaged from the wreck and sent to its destination.

Although Basque whalers were a major presence in the Labrador straits from the 1530s to the early 17th century, they haven’t gotten much attention because they didn’t put down roots. Their interest in Canada was purely commercial; there was no attempt to colonize it. They summered on the coast, building camps and red-tiled huts over cauldron furnaces which boiled for days, rendering the whale blubber. Those curved red tiles are highly distinctive, a characteristic element of Basque architecture and one of the few pieces of physical evidence the Basque crews left behind. They were also used to roof the cooperage cabins in which all those thousands of barrels needed to transport the whale oil were made.

One of the most exceptional Basque artifacts ever recovered in Labrador’s Red Bay was a nearly complete whaling rowboat known as a chalupa. Sounds delicious, I know, but it’s actually a small vessel used to chase, harpoon and tow whales. It was found pinned beneath the collapsed side of a 200-ton whaling ship and was excavated and re-assembled board by board. It’s now on display at the Red Bay National Historic Site visitor’s center, along with reconstructions of the red-tiled rendering cauldron huts, models of the San Juan and a replica of a section of a whaling hull that shows how the barrels were packed.

A woman in Somerset, England, discovered she had a rare Italian Renaissance Maiolica plate hanging on the wall of her cottage when she invited appraiser Richard Bromell of Charterhouse Auctioneers in Sherborne, Dorset, to assess some of the objects in her home for their market value. It was hanging in a makeshift wire frame behind a door that was always open. Only about two inches of it were visible when Bromwell caught a glimpse of it.

At first he thought it had to be a 19th century reproduction worth perhaps £2,000 ($3,100), but when he took it to experts at the Ashmolean Museum they confirmed that it was the real thing: a Maiolica charger made in Urbino around 1540. The owner had inherited it from a relative years ago and had no idea of its age or value. It was put up for auction at Charterhouse on February 14th with a pre-sale estimate of £100,000 ($155,000), but due to massive interest from bidders all over Europe and the US, the final hammer price was an astonishing £567,000 ($880,000).

It’s the condition and quality of the painting that made the market salivate. The dish is nearly 500 years old, but the colors are still brilliant and the finish glossy. The only damage was a repaired chip about 1.4 inches wide on the bottom of the charger. It’s barely noticeable and doesn’t overlap with any of the figures, just with the yellow border and a green scribble of grass.

The plate is 16 inches in diameter and painted in a style called istoriato, an elaborate, highly detailed scene from history or legend. The subject on this piece is the Feast of Herod, although it takes a little looking to see it. Herod and his wife sit at a table under the columned portico in the left background. Walking up the steps towards them is Salome and some ladies carrying the head of John the Baptist on a platter. In the center background between the upper tree trunk on the left and the riverbank on the right is the executioner standing next to John’s headless body.

The rest of the scene is populated by wealthy revelers banqueting front and center, musicians to the left of them, ladies dancing to the left of the musicians, skinny dippers in the river on the right and a townscape in the back. It’s a big ol’ Renaissance party that could be set in any hilly town in Europe. One extra special touch is a hint of what may be the painter’s name hidden in the fur stole of the woman sitting on the right side of the central foreground banqueting table.

The design is a version of The Feast of Herod, a woodcut by German printmaker Sebald Beham dating to 1525-1545. The maiolica version leaves out the figure of death of holding a scythe who follows a couple walking just beneath Salome and John’s head. The architecture and overall scene is compressed to fit onto a plate, but other than those changes and the marvelous addition of color, it’s a faithful rendition.

No wonder that it claimed one of the highest prices ever paid for Italian pottery. The lucky buyer was London jewelery dealer S.J. Phillips Ltd. Company director Francis Norton said: “The plate is in wonderful condition and we really fancied it and were determined to get it. We don’t know what we’ll do with it yet but we might put it on display.”

A recent addition to the British Library’s most excellent collection of digitized manuscripts is a valentine that puts contemporary efforts to shame. Written by Pierre Sala around 1500, the Petit Livre d’Amour (Little Book of Love) is a 5-inch by 3.7-inch book of poems and prose that he hand-wrote with gold ink on purple parchment and had professionally illuminated as a gift for his lover Marguerite Builloud. He even had a wood and leather carrying case made with rings on the edges so his lady love could hang it from a chain on her girdle.

Pierre Sala was a renown humanist, author, cook, personal valet and equerry to King Louis XII. Born and raised in Lyon, a center of the French Renaissance, his writings are important transitional works in the shift from the scriptural, patristic approach to scholarship of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance revival of classical philosophy and secular sources of knowledge. He wrote about the lives of Greek philosophers, collections of ancient aphorisms, histories, treatises and of course, romances and poetry.

He was also something of an accidental archaeologist and antiquities collector. When he built his house on the hill of Fourvière in the center of Lyons in 1514, he unearthed a large number of Franco-Roman remains from when the city was known as Lugdunum. This collection was so impressive the king came to visit it like a tourist in 1522. Pierre even named the house Antiquaille after them.

By then, he had sealed the deal with Marguerite. Perhaps this book helped. It is replete with references to the two of them. M and P are carved into the stylized floral pattern on the wooden cover. Their initials, drawn out of crossed compasses, decorate the pages like in a middle schooler’s Trapper Keeper. (I am aware I just seriously dated myself there). The poems and illustrations are all about love, of course, but not necessary mushy expressions thereof. The alternative name of the volume is “The Enigmas of Love” and the hardships of love, the obstacles, the dangers, are the dominant theme of the 12 drawings and the quatrains they illustrate.

Pierre starts off telling Marguerite that he wants to put his heart inside this daisy (Marguerite meaning daisy in French), that his thoughts will always be with her. The drawing opposite depicts a man putting his heart into daisy. His facial features are very basic, deliberately left so by the illustrator, a Parisian artist known as the Master of the Chronique scandaleuse, so another artist could fill in the details to make him look like Pierre. That artist was probably Jean Perréal, a painter in the employ of the French royal family who was a personal friend of Pierre’s. Perréal never did in fill the face, but he went on to make the rather dreamy portrait of Pierre at the end of the book.

The daisy allegory is followed by a man playing blind man’s bluff with three ladies, with the accompanying poem expressing his hope that if he can catch at least one of them, she won’t escape for a year. The next poem urges caution in Italian but recommends he not despair even though there are no assurances. The drawing across from it is of a solitary table with a candle burning on top.

The cautionary tales and juxtapositions — a wise man painting a fool, a pilgrim and a beggar illustrating the proverb “don’t limp in front of a lame person,” a man carrying a man on his shoulders while trampling another man on the ground illustrating the proverb “trampling on one man to help another” — continue through to the end.

My favorite is two women trying to catch flying hearts with a net. The quatrain describes the ladies as Friendly Expression and Courteous Manner who have stretched out their net to trap the unstable hearts that pass by. The best thing about that is the poem doesn’t spell out the word “heart.” It’s a little <3 drawing, a Renaissance emoticon!

We don’t know if she ever wore it like a hipster chain wallet, but Marguerite must have liked it, or at least not hated it too much, because she and Pierre were married and lived together at Antiquaille until his death in 1529.

Frescoes in the 16th-century Orthodox church of St. Friday’s in Valsh, a remote Albanian village 35 miles south of Tirana, have been damaged beyond repair by looters. Twice in a week, the first time on December 30th, the second on January 4th, thieves hacked at the frescoes with axes and knives, focusing mainly on removing the heads of saints.

To add insult to injury, the looters were incompetent. Most of the seven or eight frescoes (the number is different in different reports) attacked wound up crushed in pieces on the floor instead of removed whole. Some of the worst damage was done to the fresco of St. Friday’s. His entire head and the aureole around it is gone, as is the inscription to the left of the halo which was important for art historical reference.

The frescoes are by master icon painter Onufri who lived in Valsh and frescoed the walls of its modest little church in 1554. Known for his use of brilliant colors and his introduction of more realistic facial expressions into the flat conventions of Byzantine style, Onufri is considered Albania’s greatest icon maker, although it’s not certain if he was born in what is today Albania or in northern Greece. The signature on his Valsh frescoes — Protopapas — indicates he held a position of importance in the Greek Orthodox church.

The first bout of destruction was discovered by the villagers who notified the police, local heritage officials and the Orthodox Church immediately. The locks were changed but nothing else was done to protect the church, and the thieves just waltzed right back in five days later and hacked at the walls some more. The ease with which this offense was perpetrated has led some heritage advocates to suspect that the police may have been involved, or at least paid off.

Albania is a very bad space right now when it comes to heritage protection. Since the fall of the communist regime in 1991, more the 2,000 icons have been stolen from churches and museums. In the past two years alone, 20 Orthodox churches and monasteries have been targeted by looters. In 2007, the Ministry of Culture eliminated the custodian system which, while fairly weak, at least ensured that sites of cultural and historical importance were guarded by a living breathing human being. It was cheap, too. The guards were paid €30 ($40) a month, for a total yearly cost to the government of just €40,000 ($54,000).

I don’t care how broke they are, there is no way that this program had to be eliminated purely to save costs. In fact, after years of protests from Orthodox officials and heritage advocates, in 2011 the government budgeted €200,000 ($266,000) for cultural heritage protection. This did not assuage the people concerned about the decimation of Albania’s history, because it’s a ludicrously paltry sum.

The Ministry of Culture is irritatingly fatalistic about this ongoing disaster. Head of the heritage department Olsi Lafe said at a press conference last week that they are working with the police on the thefts at Valsh, but there isn’t much they can do on the larger problem. They have too much territory, much of it rural, to cover effectively.

“Considering the large number of religious heritage monuments, it’s impossible to protect them 24-hours a day,” the ministry said. “It would require a large number of people and a special administrative structure,” it added.

Yes it’s amazing how significant programs require manpower and funding. Shocking news there.

Archaeologists excavating inside an 18th century theater slated to become an addition to the Museum of the Works of the Cathedral in Florence have discovered what appears to be a builder’s model of the cathedral’s famous dome. The mini-dome is nine feet in diameter and features bricks laid in a herringbone pattern, a unique characteristic of the dome designed and built by architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi.

It was found in a layer two-and-a-quarter feet below surface level which contains copious metal and marble fragments from the period when the space was used as a construction workshop during the late 14th and 15th centuries, the same time when Brunelleschi was working on his dome. Herringbone brickwork had been used before in Persian domes, but Brunelleschi’s was the first in Europe, which means this model may be the first brick herringbone dome built on the continent.

The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore was built between 1420 and 1436, and the herringbone pattern was one of the key elements to Brunelleschi’s brilliant design. An octagonal dome had been planned for the cathedral by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296, but even as the rest of the church was built, the dome never moved past the model phase. The decision to eschew Gothic buttresses in favor of a classical dome was made when the design of architect Neri di Fioravante was accepted in 1367. That left the Duomo’s builders with a dilly of a pickle: how to build a huge octagonal dome without elaborate scaffolding that would make the interior of the church unusable and without exterior buttresses.

In 1418 the wool guild sponsored a contest to solve the thorny problem. Brunelleschi studied the dome of the Pantheon in Rome — still today the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world — but he couldn’t use the Pantheon’s techniques for the Duomo dome. The Roman recipe for concrete was lost, for one thing, and for another, it had required massive wooden forms to keep the dome standing while the concrete dried. There literally wasn’t enough timber in Tuscany to scaffold and frame even a masonry dome 144 feet in diameter. Also the outer walls of the cathedral had already been built, and there was no way they could withstand the compression forces of a massive, heavy dome. Besides, there was still the stricture that the interior of the church had to be open to the public during construction.

Brunelleschi’s solution was brickwork rather than concrete or stone. He built wooden vertical ribs that curved upwards from each corner of the octagonal base. The ribs had slits that wooden planks could be attached to, and then terrifying skinny platforms built off the planks for workers to use building the dome without the need for scaffolding. The bricks were then laid in a diagonal herringbone pattern that would transfer the weight of the bricks to nearest vertical rib while the mortar was drying instead of pressing downwards and collapsing onto the heads of assembled worshipers.

Even today there are many questions about how he accomplished this extraordinary feat of architecture. Brunelleschi kept his overall plan close to his chest, releasing snippets on a need-to-know basis so he couldn’t be easily replaced. The discovery of a brick and mortar model (as opposed to the small mock-up style model which is on display at the Museum of the Works of the Cathedral) could add to our understanding of Brunelleschi’s methods.

Unfortunately the top of the mini-dome is missing, probably sheared off during the construction of the theater in 1779. The theater was commissioned by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Peter Leopold, son of Maria Theresa of Austria and future Holy Roman Emperor. It replaced the many workshops used by artisans and craftsmen employed by the Works of the Cathedral since the Middle Ages, one of which may well have been the place where Michelangelo sculpted the David. The Theater of the Intrepids became known for its low-brow entertainment, raucous audiences and wholly crappy acoustics.

In the 1900s the theater was gutted and used as a garage until it was purchased by its former owners, the Works of the Duomo, in 1998. For the next decade or so, the organization used it for storage and as a restoration laboratory. In 2009, construction began to transform the space into an adjunct space for the museum. The new addition is scheduled to open in 2015. The newly discovered domelet will be fully excavated, restored as much as feasible and put on display in the new museum.

The Aztec feather headdress known as Moctezuma’s headdress or the Penacho has been restored and is now back on display at Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology. The headdress was cleaned and conserved with much success. The faded colors of the feathers have been brought back to vibrancy: feathers from the Squirrel Cuckoo that looked orange are now a deep brick red, the small blue Lovely Cotinga feathers that looked powder blue are now a brilliant turquoise, and the smaller quetzal feathers that looked the same powder blue as the Cotinga feathers are now their proper iridescent green, as are the 400 long Resplendent Quetzal tail feathers.

A commission of historians, archaeologists and ornithologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and Austria’s Kunsthistorisches Museum spent two years studying the incredibly fragile piece, investigating its historical significance and documenting its condition. They focused on historical questions — its composition, the materials and technique used in its creation — and conservation issues — how to keep it from any further deterioration.

This is the last Aztec feather headdress to have survived, and people have been trying to ensure its survival for centuries. Conservators found and removed several old restoration attempts. They did keep a few springs added in the 16th century. They’re something of historical note in and of themselves, a testament to how long this gorgeous piece has been on display, starting with Archduke Ferdinand II’s extensive private collection at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck in 1575.

There was an agenda on the table other than cleaning and conservation, namely, could the headdress survive a trip to Mexico. It was once part of the regalia either of the last Aztec king Moctezuma II or of a high priest; the Penacho was either gifted to conquistador Hernán Cortés by the king or he looted it during the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521. At some point thereafter it made its way to Europe where it was first documented in the collection of Ferdinand II, who in addition to being Archduke of Austria was also the nephew of Cortés’ boss, Spanish King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Mexico figures half a millennium of absence is long enough and would like it back for a very long term loan. The Austrian museum authorities are amenable to the idea, but only if means of transportation can be found that will not damage the piece.

Such means have not yet been found. The Museum of Ethnology constructed a display case that was custom-built to compensate for the vibrations caused by the footsteps of visitors walking around the room, because even such a small amount of movement could harm the delicate piece. They’ll have to invent something far more complex to protect the headdress from the motion of an airplane or a ship voyage. Although this isn’t likely to happen any time soon, Austria is definitely open to the prospect and talks are ongoing. Austria and Mexico are currently negotiating a new treaty on cultural exchanges. The Penacho will play a starring role in the discussions.

Now, because you’ve been so patient to read down this far (assuming you didn’t just skip to the end which is what I would have done), here are the before and after pictures:

I can see why he wouldn’t have wanted to let it go until his head was separated from his neck. It’s that beautiful. Attributed to Georg Schreiber of Königsberg, Prussia, a 17th century master craftsman famed as the chess set maker to royalty, the game board is made of opaque white amber and translucent red amber on a wood chassis with an ebony superstructure, carved Roman-style portrait busts and chased silver accents. There’s a Nine Men’s Morris board on one side, a chess board on the other, and it opens up to reveal a diptych backgammon board. Inside it holds 14 game pieces of cream amber, with a white amber profile in the center overlaid with translucent red amber, and 14 pieces of translucent orange amber. The profiles are of all the kings of England from William the Conqueror to James I.

There is no signature on the board, so we can’t be absolutely certain that it was made by Georg Schreiber. The detail on this piece is one of a kind. No other boards have been found that are so elaborately decorated with allegorical scenes, busts, Latin and German proverbs, silver accents and painted metal underlays. However, Schreiber’s style is hard to mistake, and the many highly specific commonalities between this work and the only known game board to have been signed and dated by Schreiber put the attribution on very solid ground. The signed board is dated 1616. This board is dated 1607, which makes it the earliest Schreiber game board extant.

In the first half of the 17th century, Königsberg was the center of amber craftsmanship in Europe. The Sambia Peninsula on the Baltic Sea just northwest of Königsberg had been the primary source of amber in the West since antiquity, and in the Middle Ages, the amber trade was controlled by the Teutonic Order, which ruled the area from 1255 until 1525 when their Grand Master, Albrecht of Hohenzollern, converted to Lutheranism and secularized the Order’s former territories into the Duchy of Prussia. Instead of the rosary beads which had been the primary amber product under the Teutonic Knights, artisans in Königsberg, the capital of the new duchy, focused on crafting courtly objects — caskets, cups, inlay and of course, game boards — for the nobility and aristocracy of Europe.

This particular game board with its exquisite craftsmanship and royal English theme may have first been owned by King James I, who ruled England at the time of the board’s creation and who is the last English king portrayed on the game pieces. These high quality objects were often used as diplomatic gifts. The Elector of Brandenburg, ruler of Prussia, could well have gifted it to King James.

The royal provenance is also hard to confirm, but we know that King Charles I was an avid chess player, not even interrupting his game when he was told that the Scots had changed sides and were supporting Parliament. According to the tradition that has accompanied the piece for centuries, King Charles I brought the game board to the scaffold on the day of his execution, January 30th, 1649. There he bequeathed it to William Juxon, the Bishop of London and the king’s personal chaplain who gave Charles the last rites before he was beheaded. Charles also gave Juxon the copy of the King James Bible he had brought to the scaffold with him, and he handed him his “George,” a figure of St. George slaying the dragon that is part of the accoutrements of the Order of the Garter, with the request that Juxon deliver it to the Prince of Wales.

By family tradition, Juxon left the game board to his nephew and it stayed in the family for two generations before being passed down to the Hesketh family, who added Juxon to their name as part of the inheritance stipulations. The Heskeths have owned it ever since. It’s the estate of Frederick Fermor-Hesketh, 2nd Lord Hesketh, which is now selling the piece. The Bible was given by Lady Susannah, widow of Sir William Juxon, son of the bishop’s nephew, to their neighbors the Jones family of Chastleton House. The Jacobean manor is now owned by the National Trust, but the Bible remains in the collection there. The Scaffold George, as the insignia became known, did eventually make its way to Charles’ son and is now in the Royal Collection.

Other than the long oral tradition and the clear lines of descent from William Juxon, there is some documentary evidence supporting the dramatic King Charles I story. The inventory of the King’s possessions after his execution lists “A Paire of Tables [i.e. two game boards joined together to form a diptych] of White and Yellowe Amber garnished with silver.” Written below the entry is a line saying that it was sold to a creditor of the perpetually indebted Charles for £30. Creditors got first dibs in these fire sales. This is how many of them were “repaid” after the King’s death: they bought something from the royal collection with the expectation that they would be able to resell it at a profit and get some of their money back. (One item listed on the inventory that didn’t sell was Charles’ collection of Raphael’s tapestry cartoons.)

How could the game board have been sold to a creditor if Charles gave it to Bishop Juxon, you ask? By order of Parliament, Juxon was allowed to be with the King during his final days under “the same restraint as the King is,” in other words, confined to his rooms in Whitehall Palace. From January 27th, 1649, the day the King was sentenced, until January 31st, the day after the King was executed, William Juxon was being held by Parliament. As soon as he left the scaffold, Juxon was questioned by Parliamentary authorities. They confiscated everything the King had given him and questioned him about the last thing the King said to him (“Remember”). The next day they let him go.

Both the game board and the Scaffold George are listed on the inventory. So if these objects were confiscated and sold, how could Juxon have gotten the game board back and bequeathed it to his family? The plausible answer is he simply bought it back from the creditor. The creditor in question was William Latham, a wool merchant, who was doubtless far more interested in cashing out the decorative object than in keeping it, especially since he had had to pony up £30 to buy it from Parliament. We know for a fact that that’s what happened to the Scaffold George: it was purchased by a creditor who then sold it to royalists. They saw to it that George was returned to Charles II in keeping with his father’s request.