Month: July 2009

Golden Boy’s new digs

Modern(ish), Treasures

In 1916, sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman completed a monumental statue for AT&T called “The Genius of Electricity”. Cast in bronze and covered with tens of thousands of pieces of paper-thin gold leaf, Golden Boy weighs 16 tons and stands 24 feet (7.3 meters) high, with a nine foot wingspan.

It went on top of AT&T’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan, and was at the time the second largest sculpture in New York, second only to the Statue of Liberty. It was even on the cover of phone books for a few decades until the 60’s.

Then came the break up of the Baby Bells in the 80’s and AT&T moved into a new building with a notched roof, so they made a niche in their gigantic multi-story lobby just for Golden Boy.

The telecoms just kept flailing through the 90’s and Golden Boy was moved a couple of times until he ended up in the parking lot of a New Jersey office park.

Now that SBC has bought AT&T and taken its name, they wisely decided to rescue Golden Boy from the chilling ignominy of his Jersey location and return him to glory in the lobby of their Dallas headquarters.

Lee Sandstead, who hosts the Travel Channel’s Art Attack, is enthusiastic, almost effusive.

“This is absolutely a serious work of art, and it’s absolutely a masterpiece,” said Sandstead, an art historian. “It’s perhaps the most beautiful depiction of the male figure in American art.” […]

Longman is one of the few women in American history to create monumental sculpture.

“The work was considered too physically demanding for a woman,” he said. “It required lifting heavy equipment up and down scaffolding, and bending metal.”

She was a protégé of Daniel Chester French, working with him on the design of the Lincoln Memorial. She is now largely – and, Sandstead thinks, unfairly – forgotten.

“If she had been born 30 years earlier, she would have been more famous,” he said. “By 1915, her kind of art was beginning to wane in popularity, critics were beginning to be attracted by the modernist movement, which was more abstract.”

She seems to have had a full career, though, until her death in the 1950’s. Commissions certainly kept coming in. Here she is working on a bust of Edison for the Naval Research Laboratory in 1947, just five years before she died. It was completed in 1952.

Vindolanda never stops giving

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures

Excavators at Vindolanda Fort, a Roman fort near the border with Scotland just south of Hadrian’ Wall, thought it was just going to be a rampart mound near the north gate.

What they were digging up, however, turned out to be a 1.5 ton altar to the god Jupiter.

“There is a substantial and exceptionally well preserved altar dedicated by a prefect of the Fourth Cohort of Gauls to an important eastern god, Jupiter of Doliche.”

The inscription reads: “To Jupiter Best and Greatest of Doliche, Sulpicius Pudens, prefect of the Fourth Cohort of Gauls, fulfilled his vow gladly and deservedly.” […]

Mr Birley said: “Major altars like this are very rare finds and to discover such a shrine inside the fort is highly unusual.

“The shrine also has evidence of animal sacrifice and possible religious feasting.”

Jupiter of Doliche (an ancient city in southern Turkey thought to be one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world) is represented riding a bull while holding a battle axe in one hand and a thunderbolt in the other. The other side depicts a jar and a shallow dish.

Shortly thereafter excavators uncovered a second altar in the shrine, this one dedicated by a prefect of the Second Cohort of Nervians. Only the bottom part of it remains, however, so there are no pretteh carvings.

Both the Fourth Cohort of Gauls and Second Cohort of Nervians served in Vindolanda, Epiacum to them, in the third century AD.

Vindolanda is no stranger to major finds about Roman life on the Wall, most famous among them are the wooden tablets of correspondence from soldiers, merchants, slaves, women living at the fort and its adjoining town in the first couple of centuries after Christ.

Update: Ft. Craig Buffalo Soldiers identified

Looting, Modern(ish)

I’ve posted a couple of previous entries on the sad and disturbing story of the grave-robberies at Fort Craig, New Mexico.

Quick summary: Local historian Dee Brecheisen dies leaving a large cache of artifacts which his estate sells. A tipster tells the feds that among those artifacts was the mummified corpse of a black soldier Brecheisen had looted from Fort Craig. Federal agents find the skull, then they exhume the entire Fort Craig cemetery to identify and preserve the remains from further depredation.

A vast search of military and civilian archives plus copious forensic analysis ensues in an attempt to identify the bodies. Now the three soldiers found at Fort Craig have been identified and will be reburied with full honors at Santa Fe National Cemetery on Tuesday, July 28.

Over three weeks, Owsley and his team used CT scans, X-rays, bone density scans and isotope tests to analyze the remains.

Medical records showed that Morris died from an ax wound to the back, Ford succumbed to a spinal infection and Smith suffered complications from typhoid fever.[…]

The Bureau of Reclamation placed newspaper ads in the hometowns of Smith, Morris and Ford in hopes of finding descendants, but two of the soldiers were former slaves and finding family lineage has proven difficult, said agency spokeswoman Mary Perea Carlson.

Smith was from New Market, Ky., and died in 1866; Ford was from Taylor County, Ky., and died in 1868; and Morris was from Akron, Ohio, and died in 1877.

Thomas Smith was 5’2″ and no older than 20 when he died. All the people buried at Fort Craig seem to have hard damn lives.

In addition to the harsh conditions and frontier warfare, there were murders, suicides, fatal accidents and disease: typhoid, cholera, dysentery and smallpox, among others.

The bones of one woman — burial No. 33 — revealed the ravages of what was probably advanced syphilis. The spines of men in the cavalry were deteriorated from long hours in the saddle. Several skulls bore gunshot wounds, most likely the result of a bloody Civil War battle nearby.

A criminal forensic artist did a facial reconstruction from the skulls so we have sketches of what two of the Buffalo Soldiers may have looked like.

A Jacobean space program

Modern(ish)

John Wilkins was a 17th c. inventor, academic, bishop, and Oliver Cromwell’s brother-in-law. In the 1640’s, he designed a space-going vessel that he thought would send a man to the Moon to establish trade agreements with the locals.

Not to crap on the most excellent Apollo rocket, but Wilkins had flair Werner von Braun could only dream of. His plans featured a wooden ‘chariot’ that would be propelled to the Moon by gunpowder, feather wings and springs.

Suppose this earth were A, which was to move in the circle C, D. and let the bullet be supposed at B. within its proper verge; I say, whether this earth did stand stil or move swiftly towards D, yet the bullet would still keepe at the same distance by reason of that Magneticke vertue of the center (if I may so speake) whereby all things within its spheare are attracted with it. So that the violence to the bullet, being nothing else but that whereby ’tis removed from its center, therefore an equall violence can carry a body from its proper place, but at an equall distance whether or no the center stand still or move.

Yeah, I’m not sure I really get it either but apparently he was pwning Copernicus on the motion of the earth in this passage.

Sadly he doesn’t seem to have reached the prototype stage of the space chariot, although he was known to have built and tested a variety of flying machines when he was at Oxford, around 1654.

If you want to get a manageable and highly entertaining glimpse of Jacobean science, philosophy, theology, technology and how intertwined they all were, you could do far worse than to read The Discovery of a World in the Moone Or, A Discovrse Tending To Prove That ‘Tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World In That Planet.

For something a tad closer to home, keep an eye on Space.com for the first new pictures of the Apollo Moon landing sites in decades. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will be looking out for our remains, including the American flag Armstrong planted that Aldrin saw blow down when the Eagle departed.

Metal detectors strike again

Ancient, Treasures

This time it’s a gigantic hoard of over 1000 Roman silver coins.

I think the date is initially misprinted in the article, though. It claims the coins date from between 206 BC and 195 BC, but that has to be AD. The head of Augustus is on many of the coins, and he wasn’t a twinkle in his great-great-grandmammy’s eye in 195 BC.

Mr Bennett, 42, who works at the central library in Leamington Spa, found the hoard in farmer Peter Turner’s field in Stratford-upon-Avon on July 13 last year.

Landowner Peter Turner, 74, said: ‘Keith had been metal detecting and suddenly stopped because he saw a large number of objects flash up on his screen.

‘After digging down around four feet he saw the top of a large pot had been smashed and hundreds of silver coins were inside.’

The quantity of coins is huge. Even back then it would have been worth five times a Roman soldier’s yearly salary. Most likely whoever owned the land buried the coins for safekeeping.

The British Museum is still appraising the hoard — it’s certainly worth tens of thousands of pounds — but it was officially declared a treasure today.