The History Blog

It’s actually been on loan at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for almost a hundred years, but the descendants of Eliza Lucas Pinckney have now donated it to the museum.

Pinckney’s dress is an excellent example of a typical sack-back dress from the period, and it is only one of two in the Smithsonian collection that has both the original matching stomacher and petticoat. A sack, or robe à la française, has flowing pleats that fall from the shoulders, making the gown appear to be unfitted in the back. A stomacher is a decorative piece that covers the front of the corset, where the gown’s bodice edges were intentionally separated.

The dress is notable not just for its beauty and rarity, but also because its original wearer, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, was an immensely successful business woman who ran her father’s plantations from the age of 16 and pretty much single-handedly provided South Carolina with the cash crop that sustained it in the decades between the decline of rice and the advent of cotton: indigo.

The silk threads woven into the golden gown were spun from silk worms she herself bred, in fact, in one of her many successful agricultural experiments.

I couldn’t let the first annual National Train Day pass without comment.

May 10 was chosen as the National Train Day in commemoration of the day the last rail and the last spike — an engraved golden spike now residing in the museum — joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869.

I love me some trains, and in this day and age when air travel costs far more than the ticket price in discomfort, humiliation and delays, and car travel gets increasingly more prohibitive as the price of a full tank skyrockets, it’s good to see Amtrak actually wake the hell up and get some PR steam.

For some fantastic period pictures and scans of news articles published on the day, check out the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum.

The looters got there first, of course, but at least some of the 27 might be intact, and even the empty ones might have beautiful frescoes, which are fairly rare among archaeological explored tombs (60 painted tombs out of 6,000).

Archaeologists say there is also a “good chance” that there may well be other tombs waiting to be discovered. The tombs were discovered at Tarquinia, 50 miles north of Rome in an area named a World Heritage Site by Unesco.

Covering more than 400 acres, the area was the burial ground for the Etruscan tribes who predated the Romans. Maria Tecla Castaldi, an archaeologist, said: “This is the most exciting discovery here in decades. There are frescoes of two figures on the walls, but we need to carry out a proper excavation and search.

Tarquinia is like a honeycomb of Estruscan necropolises. There’s not just a “good chance” that there are other tombs in the area. It’s a given.

That good chance would convert into a sure thing if archaeologists could ask the local tombaroli (tomb robbers). Twenty-seven tombs is a week’s work for these guys. They’re miles ahead of the authorities.

More yuge loot news out of Spain, only this time it’s not massive quantities but just plain massive.

Italian police from the stolen artwork squad were in Barcelona on business when they happened past an antiques store. In the store, they noticed a solid marble oval bathtub that looked suspiciously familiar.

It was billed as a reproduction of a Roman bathtub and priced at €6000 ($9230). Only it isn’t a reproduction, and it’s actually worth €300,000 ($461,500). It was made in the second century A.D. under Hadrian’s reign and was stolen from the garden of an Italian villa in 2005.

The store owner had bought it a couple of years ago from some total idiots for €3000. Here’s the thing that really gets me, though: this tub weighs half a ton. How in God’s name did the thieves get it out of that garden? It can’t have been any kind of stealth operation. I mean, cranes and vehicles that make loud beeping sounds must have been involved.

Then to go through the trouble of shipping their half-ton of ill-gotten gains across the Mediterranean for a pittance …. It’s like a Mack Sennett short: The Keystone Bathtub Thieves.

Spanish police have arrested two people for smuggling an enormous cache of looted pre-Colombian artifacts.

Seven hundred antiques including masks, sculptures, jewelry and ceramics, dozens made of gold, all of them extremely valuable museum-quality artifacts looted from archaeological sites in Peru and Ecuador were weeks away from the auction block.

It is alleged that the historic treasures were plundered from archaeological sites - mostly in Peru and Ecuador - and then sold on to the couple through middlemen in Colombia.

The couple had just returned from a trip to the Colombian capital, Bogota.

The Spanish police seized documents and a computer which allegedly detailed a trade in cultural contraband stretching back years.

One interesting thing about these low-down dirty no good sons of bitches “antiquities dealers” is that they tend to keep excellent records. If police can manage a surprise raid, they can get loads of information about the criminal organization.

I hope they throw every book they have at them.

The London and Provincial Antique Dealer’s Association called their fair this year “Objects of Desire” and they weren’t lying.

A beautiful Roman double-headed bust of Bacchus and Ariadne sold for approximately $470,000, far above estimate but far below its artistic and historical value in my eyes.

Especially since it actually has a provenance, and a rather romantic one at that. It was purchase by a British army officer in Jerusalem during World War II.

The officer, Somerset de Chair, spotted it in an antique shop opposite the King David Hotel and placed a deposit on it, arranging payment terms in case he did not return from battle.

De Chair, who served as an intelligence officer during the siege of Baghdad, subsequently returned after sustaining an injury, arranged an export licence, and shipped it to the family home at Chilham Castle in Kent as “wounded officer’s kit”.

After he died in 1995, it was inherited by his elder son, Rodney de Chair, who was the seller last week.

Elder son = crazy. (Or seriously hard up.)

In front of the high altar in Westminster Abbey lies an intricate Cosmati mosaic made of exotic colored marble, glass and gemstones so delicate that it has been covered up for much of the 20th century.

Even Queen Elizabeth II had to stand on carpeting during her coronation because it was deemed too perilous to perch the throne, flunkies and other imperial accoutrements on the mosaic proper as had been done for 6 centuries before.

Now that a two-year restoration program has begun, the layers of carpeting have finally been removed so visitors may actually get a glimpse of the beauty.

The wraps have come off one of Westminster Abbey’s least known treasures, a medieval marble pavement foretelling the end of the world, while conservation experts consider how to preserve the ancient stones for the next 740 years.

Few modern visitors have ever seen it, although since 1268 kings and princes, queens and cardinals have walked across a symbol laden mosaic as intricate as a piece of jewellery.

It is made up of rare marbles and gemstones, including some recycled from monuments 1,000 years older, and pieces of coloured glass, set in complex allegorical patterns into a framework of Purbeck marble cut as intricately as a jigsaw puzzle.

The allegory of the shapes apparently contains references to the end of the world, as does an inscription that is now almost entirely gone but was transcribed in the 15th century:

If the reader wittingly reflects upon all that is laid down,
he will discover here the end of the primum mobile:
the hedge lives for three years,
add in turn dogs, and horses and men
stags and ravens, eagles, huge sea monsters, the world;
each that follows triples the years of the one before.

Cool, huh? I do love a quality obscure-metaphor-packed apocalyptic code. Here’s a neat interpretation of the inscription.

This inscription refers to the medieval belief that the earth was fixed at the centre of nine moving spheres, which carried the sun, moon, five known planets, and the fixed stars. The ninth and outermost sphere, beyond the fixed stars, was called the “primum mobile” (first moved) because it was thought to be the sphere set in motion by God, which provided the motive power of all the other spheres.

“The end of the primum mobile” means the age of the universe when it will come to an end - at the Day of Judgement. The verse claims that this can be calculated by tripling the life-spans of God’s other creations. So the hedge, standing for three years, is tripled to give the life-span of a dog (nine years), which in turn is tripled to give the life-span of a horse (27 years). The final age, the life-span of the primum mobile, is 19,683 years - three raised to the power of nine. This was appropriate for the age of the ninth sphere.

That’s a pretty generous End of Days assessment. How are you supposed to get a bevy of adoring supine girls and the entire contents of their daddy’s bank accounts when the apocalypse is 20 thousand years away?

Yasukazu Minagaki was an early 19th c. physician who made amazingly detailed and realistic anatomical paintings of executed criminals he had dissected.

Unlike his Western colleagues, Minagaki didn’t truck with no idealized Vitruvian forms. He was paintbrush-deep in the gruesome reality of decapitated bodies.

The Kaibo Sonshinzu is a collection of color anatomical drawings on two scrolls by Minagaki Yasukazu, a doctor of the late Edo Period. The collection was intended to cover inadequacies in the results of dissections conducted by Koishi Genshun, a doctor from Kyoto. Taking the Western-style anatomies of the German doctor Johann Adam Kulmus and others that appeared in Anatomische Tabellen as a reference, the collection is significant in that it includes illustrations by the doctor himself based on observations of individual organs from more than 40 bodies. Containing 83 illustrations, it is said to be the best collection of anatomical drawings by a Japanese hand from the early 19th Century.

I’d say it’s one of the best collections of anatomical drawings by any hand from pretty much any century.

For more anatomical drawings from the Kaibo Sonshinzu scrolls, see here and here.

Commissioned by the deliciously titled Franz Anton, Count of Sporck, “Argippo” — a tale of romance and intrigue at a Maharajah’s court — until yesterday had been performed only once in the Count’s private theater in 1730 before the entire score disappeared.

A single copy of the libretto remained, however, in Prague’s National Library, and that’s where Czech harpsichordist and conductor of a Baroque ensemble Ondrej Macek started his search.

Macek’s next “logical” step was to sniff out the movements of the Italian musicians recruited to perform the 1730 premier.

“After Prague, the Antonio Denzio company left for Regensburg (Germany), so I decided to go there myself.” His quest led him to the private archives of the princely home of Thurn und Taxis, in Bavaria.

Within two weeks, Macek happened upon the scores, tucked inside an 18th-century musical manual.

“I immediately knew that this is what I was looking for because it corresponded to the libretto from Prague’s National Library,” said Macek.

The score wasn’t complete, though. About a third of it was missing, so Macek filled in the blanks by searching for individual Vivaldi arias.

Nothing was left then but to perform the opera, and that’s what Macek and the Baroque ensemble Hofmusici did on Saturday, May 3rd, in one of the few remaining locations in Prague that has the proper acoustics for Baroque music: the Spanish Hall in Prague Castle.

The remains of Tsar Nicholas, Empress Alexandra, their daughters the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia, were unearthed outside Yekaterinburg in 1991, but Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria’s bones were missing.

Naturally this fueled rumors that the hemophiliac 13-year-old and his 19-year-old sister had somehow managed to escape a point-blank firing squad execution in a basement in the middle of the night, continuing the heated debate over the fate of the Romanov children well into the 21st century.

In August 2007, a search party unearthed bone fragments in a scorched location suggested by Yakov Yurovsky, the firing squad leader, in his memoirs as the place where Alexei and Maria were burned and buried.

Now both Russian and US laboratories have confirmed that the remains are those of the the final two children of Nicholas and Alexandra.

The test results were based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material passed down only from mothers to children. That DNA is more stable than nuclear DNA — the material inherited from the father’s side — especially when remains are badly damaged.

In this case, the bone fragments were so shattered and burned that Rogaev’s team first had to determine whether enough uncontaminated genetic material still existed for testing.

The delicate work proved that, indeed, useful DNA could be extracted from a very small amount of the material — a critical fact, since they wanted to preserve as much of the bone fragments as possible out of respect for the victims.

The labs are currently working on testing the nuclear DNA of the bone fragments as well to confirm the results of the mitochondrial tests.

No comment so far from the Russian Orthodox Church or the descendants of the Russian royal family. Neither party was particularly keen on the 1991 finds, so I doubt they’ll embrace the results of this one with open arms.

Here are the Romanovs in happier times (1913), with Maria standing behind her father to the left of her mother, and Alexei between Anastasia (left) and Tatiana (right):