Category: Renaissance

Testicle dagger among finds at Gullberg Fortress in Sweden

Medieval, Renaissance

A testicle dagger, a style of knife named after the phallic shape of the hilt, dating the mid-1400s has been discovered at Gullberg Fortress in Gothenburg, southwestern Sweden. The dagger has an iron blade and a wood handle made of curly birch decorated with circles. It was found broken — the tip of the blade is gone, and the edge extensively chipped — and in the same excavation layer as crossbow bolts, indicating that it was used in battle conditions.

The hill overlooking the mouth of the Göta River had a fortress as early as the 14th century. For centuries the location was Sweden’s only direct outlet to the North Sea as the rest of the west coast belonged to Denmark-Norway, so it was of great strategic importance. The modern city of Gothenburg was founded in 1621, but when the fort was built, it protected its predecessor city, Lödöse, a Viking settlement that grew into a major trade center by the 13th century.

Gullberg was attacked early and often, and there is evidence of multiple phases of destruction and reconstruction between the 14th and the 17th centuries. It was destroyed for good by Danish troops in 1612. An eyewitness, Cecilia Krakow, who was just 10 years old and lived at the fortress with her mother Emerentia Pauli, described the Danish attack thus:

“At last, 25 or 30 of the Danes entered our cottage, where we children were, and the maid was baking. They sat down around the table and benches and demanded food, for they were tired
and hungry, having gone two days without eating. The maid gave them some cakes. They ate and dried themselves, thinking that the others would surely handle things well at the castle.
But God, and my blessed mother, along with the soldiers’ wives, dragged out barrels and tubs and whatever else they could find, to throw and pull into the passage so that no more of them could enter the courtyard.”

The small stone tower, dubbed the Scounce of the Lion, standing on the hilltop today was built in the 1680s. The fortress site was excavated between 2014 and 2023 as part of a railway construction project. Not surprisingly, the oldest artifacts found in the excavation were weapons, including crossbow bolts and arrowheads. Later weaponry unearthed at Gullberg Balls include lead balls for light cannons and pistols. The cannon balls were made in the fortress and some of them were fired.

Archaeologists uncovered the remains of a cellar and staircase from a 16th century tower. The walls were an astonishing 13 feet wide. Artifacts found in the cellar include beer barrel taps, a sand sprinkler for absorbing excess ink and a sundial. The sundial is a particularly notable find because it’s an engraved slab of limestone and while its pointer is missing, the rest of it is intact.

A selection of the artifacts found in nearly a decade of excavations are now on display at the Historical Museum in Stockholm in its Current Archaeology exhibition which runs through January 2026.

National Gallery acquires altarpiece with amazing dragon

Museums, Renaissance

The National Gallery, London, has just acquired an early 16th century altarpiece full of mystery, from its authorship to its iconography to its absolutely amazing razor-toothed, terrier-eared dragon, for £16.4m ($22m). This is a huge sum for an unattributed Old Master, but the price tag attests to the extraordinary quality of The Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret.

The oil-on-panel altarpiece depicts the Virgin and Child enthroned under a richly embroidered cloth canopy. Behind her stand ornately painted pilasters topped with marble capitals carved with scenes from the Old Testament and others that have yet to be identified. The Virgin is flanked by an angel on each side, one playing a mouth harp, the other holding a hymnal. In front of the angels and to the sides are two saints: Saint Louis (King Louis IX of France) and Saint Margaret emerging from the broken body of the enraged dragon who ate her but couldn’t stomach the cross she wore.

The Virgin enthroned with angels and saints was a popular subject, but this rendition has a number of eccentricities that make it unique. Mary’s throne sits on plain wood steps, stark timber compared to the lush textiles and ornate decoration on the throne and pilasters. There are no other examples of plain timber steps in paintings on this subject from this period. Saint Louis’ metal sceptre, topped with a writhing mass of humanity, is far from the usual crown jewel. But most freaky of all is Margaret’s marvelous slobbering dragon. There are many dragons in Margaret iconography, some she emerges from, some she beats with a hammer, but none like him.

Researchers think it was either painted by a Netherlandish artist or a French one. There are significant parallels between this piece and the early work of Jan Gossaert; i.e., the foreshortened faces of the angels and saints, the way the brocade and metalwork are rendered, the underdrawing techniques. The Netherlands hypothesis is also supported by the panel itself, which is Baltic oak. French artists used local wood. On the other hand, the presence of Louis, the specificity of his facial features, the meticulous detail in the Order of Saint Michael chain he wears, suggest a French artist. One possibility is the Master of Moulins, Jean Hey, known for his mastery of dramatic light and shadow and monumental figures who fill the space to the edges.

The depiction of the chain is so precise it helps date the altarpiece. Dendrochronological analysis of the oak found that it the panel had to have been painted after 1483. The double knots (aiguillettes) on the Order of Saint Michael chain stopped being used in 1516 when King Francis I changed its design. This suggests the chain was painted from life before then. From other stylistic elements, researchers estimate a date of around 1510.

The earliest documentation of the painted is a 1602 record of it in the Premonstratensian Abbey of Drongen (Tronchiennes) in Ghent, present-day Belgium. It was close to a hundred years old by then, but there is a possibility that it was commissioned for the priory church and had been there since the beginning. The Premonstratensian order revered Saint Louis for having granted them the right to bear the fleur-de-lis in their crest, and they are known to have dedicated an altar to the Virgin Mary and Saint Margaret in the Ghent priory in 1608. The painting itself may contain a hint. There are a pair of swans with entwined necks in the decoration on the right pilaster, and the swan was the monastery’s central heraldic emblem.

While it has been published before, the extraordinary detail and vivid palette of the altarpiece has never been reproduced in color until now, nor has the public had the opportunity to see its splendor in decades. It was privately owned and the last time it was exhibited was in 1960. The National Gallery was well-aware of its greatness, however, and has long yearned for it. Thanks to funding from the American Friends of the National Gallery, the museum was able to make its wish come true and acquire it in a private sale brokered by Sotheby’s.

The painting goes on display on May 10th in C C Land: The Wonder of Art, the National Gallery’s major rehang of its collection of Western European art, in the newly-reopened Sainsbury Wing where the museum’s earliest works are housed. You can devour the delicious detail of this altarpiece by zooming in on the high resolution image of it in the National Gallery’s online collection.

Massachusetts museum reunites 16th c. Dutch triptych

Museums, Renaissance

The Worcester Art Museum (WAM) in Massachusetts has acquired The Entombment, the central panel of a triptych by 16th century Dutch painter Maarten van Heemskerck, reuniting it with its two side panels for the first time in 250 years. The two wings are on long-term loan to the WAM by its private owners, the Selldorff family.

The oil-on-panel central painting is three feet high and dates to around 1540. Only recently rediscovered and attributed to van Heemskerck, the work was offered for sale this March by Turin gallery Caretto & Occhinegro at the Tefaf Maastricht international art fair for €500,000 ($567,000). The gallery owners were committed to arranging the sale to a museum, and the WAM in particular once it was identified as the central panel of the dismembered triptych.

Marten van Heemskerck (1498-1574) was the leading painter of Haarlem from the middle of the 16th century until his death. He spent four years in Italy from 1532 to 1536, making a study of its ancient art and architecture. He was strongly influenced by the great masters of 16th century Italy, including Michelangelo, Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna. Upon his return to the Netherlands, he was the first to introduce Italianate Renaissance style.

The combination of Italian Renaissance and traditional Flemish styles so well illustrated in The Entombment was Marten van Heemskerck’s specialty. The central panel depicts Christ’s body lowered into a marble sarcophagus surrounded by figures including the Virgin Mary, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and Mary Magdalene. Visible in the misty the distance past the rounded cavern entrance of the tomb is the hill of Calvary with Jesus’ empty cross in the middle and the two thieves still on their crosses on each side.

The two wing panels, originally part of the triptych, feature portraits of the family that commissioned the work. Their rocky grotto backgrounds and landscape elements align with the central panel, confirming their original connection. The central painting was likely displayed in the artist’s studio, where prospective buyers could purchase it and commission custom wings that would then be attached to the central panel. Now on long-term loan at WAM, the Selldorff family’s panels were once part of the collection of Tom Selldorff’s grandfather, Richard Neumann, an Austrian Jewish collector whose artworks were looted by the Nazis. The panels were not returned to Neumann’s heirs until 2011.

The triptych will be reunited and put on display in the museum’s European gallery this summer.

First English cheese treatise digitized, transcribed

Multimedia, Renaissance

The University of Leeds has digitized a 16th century manuscript that is the earliest known English book about cheese. In fact, it is probably the earliest English-language treatise on a single foodstuff of any kind. The high-resolution scans of the volume and a much more readable pdf transcript are now available to on the university’s website for modern readers to enjoy.

The “pamflyt compiled of Cheese, contayninge the differences, nature, qualities, and goodnes, of the same” was written in the 1580s but it was privately owned for centuries and completely unknown and unpublished when it emerged in a May 2023 auction. It sold for £45,000 ($60,000), acquired by the University of Leeds thanks to a grant from the non-profit Friends of the Nation’s Libraries. The “pamflyt” then joined the university’s library’s extensive Cookery Collection of manuscripts and printed books about food.

The book was hand-written on 112 vellum pages with a gilt-stamped lion rampant on the center of the front and back covers. The lion is likely a heraldic reference to the Fisher family, as the front flyleaf contains a note signed by “Cle[ment] Fyssher”, a member of parliament from Great Packington, Warwickshire, asking a friend that the book be returned to him after perusal. The name of “Walter Bailei”, regius professor of medicine at Oxford and one of Queen Elizabeth I’s physicians, appears on the last page. The third name that appears in the book is “Ed]ward Willughbi” at the head of the flyleaf inscription. The Willoughbys were a family of parliamentarians from Bore Place, Kent.

Whether they or anyone else authored the book is unknown, but Willoughby seems the likeliest candidate of the three because of a mention in the book of the village of Kingsnorth near Ashford in Kent as a center of cheesemaking. Kingsnorth had no reputation for cheeses at all, nor did the county of Kent for that matter, so this suggests the author had special localized knowledge of the area. On the other hand, the work repeatedly references Galen, the 3rd century Greek physician whose writings on anatomy and medicine based on the four humors theory was the foundation of Western medical thought well into the 17th century. As a physician, Bayley was very well-versed in Galen’s writings, and left two of his works to Oxford in his will. The treatise also addresses medicinal uses of cheese, including a revolting prescription of Galen’s calling for smearing rancid cheese and bacon fat on the swollen joints of a gout patient so that the skin breaks and the fluids causing the swelling run out.

The manuscript’s elegant secretary hand was transcribed by Ruth Bramley, one of 200 living historians at the 16th century manor house of Kentwell Hall who re-enact the functions and events of the Tudor mansion, creating immersive historical events for visitors to experience. She is a spinner and weaver, but she has become adept at reading 500-year-old handwriting in the course of her work. Another of Kentwell Hall’s living historians has a unique insight into the treatise thanks to her practical experience in Tudor cheese-making.

[Bramley’s] colleague Tamsin Bacchus, who works in the Tudor Dairy at Kentwell, comments, “What warmed my heart towards the author of the Pamflyt is that when he finds conflicting ideas among his learned sources, he turns to his contemporaries who actually know the work: he ‘diligently inquyred of countrey folke, who have experience in theis matters,’ and they settled the argument for him.

“The debate about whether one can eat cheese on certain religious fasting days because of the animal element in the rennet feels surprisingly modern. An alternative suggested was to use fish guts to curdle the milk! It’s also reassuring to find written down what we know from our actual practice in the Kentwell Dairy: that to make a really hard cheese to keep indefinitely (‘Suffolk Thump’) you skim off all the cream. He’s a bit scathing about it, though, calling it ‘the worste kind of cheese, accordinge to our Englishe proverbe, hit is badde cheese when the butter is gone to the market.'”

Villa d’Este’s Grotto of Diana reopens to the public after 50 years

Renaissance

The 16th century Grotto of Diana in the sumptuous gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, an hour’s drive outside of Rome, is reopening to the public after 50 years of closure and two years of meticulous restoration work. Funded by iconic Roman fashion brand Fendi, restorers from the Autonomous Institute of Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este (VILLÆ), who maintain the Renaissance estate and Hadrian’s country palace next to it, have brought the crumbling, darkened, moisture-damaged space back from the brink of dilapidation and literally turned the lights back on, showcasing the vivid polychrome wall and ceiling mosaics and reliefs as they were when they first enchanted the Este family in 1572.

The Villa d’Este, renown for the immense, complex terraced gardens with its iconic fountains that surround the extraordinary Late Mannerist villa, has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001. It was commissioned in 1560 by Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, son of Lucrezia Borgia and her third husband Alfonso I d’Este, who had spent the previous decade vying tenaciously for the papal mitre only to fail no fewer than six times. He finally gave up and decided to retire to Tivoli. He was a dedicated patron of the arts and had been deeply involved in renovations and construction of Este palaces in Ferrara, Rome, Siena and Fontainebleau. He was also the main mover and patron behind the restoration of his ancient neighbor, the Villa Adriana, the enormous country palace complex built by the Emperor Hadrian (117-138 A.D.).

Ippolito hired architect Pirro Ligorio to create a magnificent chateau with a giardino delle meraviglie (garden of marvels) that would become a model for stately gardens in Europe. The gardens were embellished with many fountains, basins, waterfalls and grottos. There were jets that were triggered when visitors walked through the arcades and some of the first hydraulic automatons ever built.

Inspired by the nymphae of ancient Greece and Rome, the Grotto di Diana was added to the gardens between 1570 and 1572 by Paolo Calandrino. Located in the upper level of the garden on the Cardinal’s Walk, it has a cruciform chambered design with large caryatids on the corners of the cross vault. The central area has a niche against the wall with a faux natural rocky backdrop and a fountain. Three arms of the cross feature barrel vaulted ceilings, bas reliefs and another fountain, and he third arm leads to a loggia that looks out over the hills with a perfect view of Rome in the distance.

The interior of the grotto is decorated with polychrome mosaics made of a variety of materials — stucco, shell fragments, enamels, glass paste tesserae, glazed majolica, semi-precious stones — that create texture and movement in the reflection of light. The vaulted ceilings feature marine motifs and the wall mosaics feature scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The floors have brown terracotta tiles in the loggia, and colorful glazed terracotta tiles featuring the emblems from the Este family heraldry, including lilies, eagles and apples.

Restoration of the grotto began in 2023. VILLÆ conservators found missing pieces of the sculptures and reliefs, mortar loss, oxidized metal supports and rapidly deteriorating mosaics and tiles, eroded by moisture and wind. The restoration focused on the most conservative intervention, using authentic materials and techniques wherever possible while incorporating modern elements when necessary: a protective glass panel added to the loggia with the view of Rome, a new lighting system that underscores the nymphaeum’s extraordinary colors and textures, a new walkway for increased accessibility.

The Grotto di Diana officially reopens to the public on May 6th.