Month: March 2009

Juliet’s balcony available for weddings and bar mitzvahs

Medieval, Social policy

j/k on the bar mitzvahs, but it really is opening for weddings. The city of Verona is hoping to market itself as the capital of love with the famous balcony as the epicenter.

Britons and other European Union nationals will be charged 800 euros (£740). Couples from outside the EU must pay 1,000 euros.

Locals will have to pay a comparatively cheap 600 euros, although that is still expensive when compared with an ordinary marriage certificate in Italy, which costs just 50 euros. […]

The balcony is part of a 14th century building known as Juliet’s House, which was once the home of the Cappello family – possibly the model for the Capulets of Shakespeare’s play.

Even more possibly not related to the play at all. There was no feud between the Cappelli and Montecchi, and no famous lovers that we know of. Shakespeare made it all up, basically, and now Verona is looking to cash in.

And why not? It’s a lovely, picturesque location, and down in the courtyard there’s a statue of Juliet which brings good fortune to people who rub her right breast. Hence the noticeably shiny patina in the chestal area.

The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land

Ancient, Modern(ish), Multimedia

The DAAHL is a searchable, browseable compendium of data from Google Earth, Google Maps, Geographic Information Systems and up to date archaeology of what are today Israel, Palestine, Jordan, southern Lebanon, Syria and the Sinai Peninsula.

It’s still a work in progress, but you can already find all kinds of really neat things. Say, for instance, you want to see maps of the various empires that have claimed the area over the years. Just clicky here, choose the empire in the dropdown box and voila. Or even more entertaining, click on the Animate Empires button to see them all in succession.

Predynastic Egypt was tiny! I had no idea it was such a shrimp compared to New Kingdom Egypt.

Then there’s the Archaeological Periods map. Here too you can select periods or animate them all, and you’ll see the site locations where artifacts from those periods have been found. All the maps are zoomable, so you can click in for a closer view on these smaller locations.

If you have the Google Earth plugin — which you should get only for this if for no other reason — you can view artifacts in 3D in the Online Virtual Museum. The list of scanned artifacts is still very small, but they’re working on it.

Think of the possibilities here for all museums. They could digitize their entire holdings allowing people the kind of detailed closeup view that security in real life museums never allows. They could also virtually display their huge caches of items in storage.

It’s the wave of the future, y’all. Virtual reality without the dorky helmet.

Rare Mayan panels found in Guatemala

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating the Mayan city of El Mirador in Guatemala’s northern jungle have unconvered two large Mayan panels dating to 300 B.C. They’re representations of the Mayan creation myth, the Popol Vuh.

These panels are the earliest known sculptural depictions of the main characters in the Popol Vuh, the hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

The newly discovered panels, both 26 feet long and stacked on top of each other, were created around 300 BC and show scenes from the core Mayan mythology, the Popol Vuh.

It took investigators three months to uncover the carvings while excavating El Mirador, the biggest ancient Mayan city in the world, the site’s head researcher, Richard Hansen, said on Wednesday.

On one panel, the twins are depicted surrounded by cosmic monsters and above them is a bird deity with outstretched wings. On the other, there is a Mayan corn god framed by an undulating serpent….

The Popol Vuh as we’ve known up until know is a book, originally written in the Quiché language in the 16th c. A.D., so to find these figures in action more than 1800 years earlier shows the remarkable endurance of the Mayan religion.

Interesting side note: the 500,000 acre site of El Mirador is endangered by looters, drug traffickers and deforestation, so the Guatemalan government is enacting a plan to make a national park out of the area, complete with a silent, propane-powered train to carry tourists to the area that currently can only be accessed by helicopter and a two-day hike through the jungle.

Secret message found in Lincoln’s pocket watch

Modern(ish), Treasures

The descendants of Jonathan Dillon, Abraham Lincoln’s watchmaker, have had a family legend that their ancestor carved a graffito in Lincoln’s watch after the attack on Fort Sumter and then returned it to the president without telling him.

Dillon told his children (and, half a century later, a reporter for the New York Times) that he opened the watch’s inner workings and scrawled his name, the date and a message for the ages: “The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try.”

The gold watch is now at the Smithsonian where watchmaker George Thomas has taken it apart gear by gear to solve the mystery once and for all.

Turns out, Mr. Dillon’s hindsight wasn’t exactly 20/20. He didn’t actually make any predictions about slavery, but he did mark the opening salvo of Civil War.

Split into three different sections to get around the tiny gears, was this razor-thin etching: “Jonathan Dillon April 13, 1861. Fort Sumter was attacked by the rebels on the above date. Thank God we have a government.”

Douglas Stiles, Dillon’s great-great grandson, is thrilled to bits. He’s the one who alerted the Smithsonian about the family legend and the New York Times article from 1906 he just found out about last month.

Shakespeare was kind of a babe

Renaissance, Treasures

Up until now we haven’t really had reliable portraits of William Shakespeare. Only two are considered canonical: an engraving by Martin Droeshout from the First Folio of his plays published in 1623, and a memorial bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Shakespeare died in 1616, so both of these images are posthumous, and although there have been a handful of other portraits speculated to be of the bard, none of them have proven to be authentic.

According to Stanley Wells, the chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, we have a very likely candidate now in the Cobbe oil painting.

Wells is convinced that an oil painting on wood panel that has rested for centuries in the collection of an old Irish family was painted from life around 1610, when Shakespeare was 46. […]

The painting has languished for centuries outside Dublin at Newbridge House, home base of the Cobbe family, where until recently no one suspected it might be a portrait of the Bard. Three years ago, Alec Cobbe, who had inherited much of the collection in the 1980s and placed it in trust, found himself at an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London called “Searching for Shakespeare.” There he saw a painting from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., that had been accepted until the late 1930s as a portrait of Shakespeare from life. Looking at it, Cobbe felt certain the Folger painting was a copy of the one in his family’s collection.

Wells ran dendrochronology (tree ring dating) tests on the wooden panel, had it X-rayed and subjected to infrared reflectography. All methods confirm a date of 1610 which suggests the Cobbe painting is not just the only living portrait of Shakespeare, but also the source of later portraits like the Folger painting and the Droeshout engraving.

This confirms indications in the literary record that Shakespeare had a serious fan club when he was alive, serious enough for there to be a demand for images of him.

The Cobb portrait also presents the son of a glovemaker as something of a toff.

“The Cobbe portrait will show people a man who was of high social status,” says Wells. “He’s very well dressed. He’s wearing a very beautiful and expensive Italian lace collar. A lot of people have the wrong image of Shakespeare, and I’m pleased that the picture confirms my own feelings — this is the portrait of a gentleman.”

Not to mention kind of a babe.