September 2009 – Page 2 – The History Blog

Ancient Rome’s best paintings, all in one place

September 25, 2009

Some of ancient Rome’s most beautiful wall paintings are scattered around in museums all over Italy and Europe.

Now for the first time, 100 of these works (mainly frescoes with a handful of extremely rare portraits on wood) representing the four major styles of Roman painting over the course of 400 years are on display in one place: Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale museum.

The pieces all come from patrician villas discovered in Rome and the Campania region (where Naples, Sorrento and Pompeii are) starting in the 17th century. If you wanted to see them all in their regular domiciles, you’d have to go to Rome, Naples, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Monaco, Frankfurt and Zurich.

The halls of the exhibition are dim and each of the works has an individually designed back and front lighting system. Some of the piece[s] are so large that the viewer has a feeling that he might just be a guest in the Roman house.

“The rich ancient Romans wanted to live in houses that seemed like the houses of the Gods of Olympus,” La Rocca said[,] “And they wanted to relax in a dream-like atmosphere of satyrs and nymphs.”

One large wall panel contains tiny figures evoking everyday life painted in white on a black background.

The panel, taken from the Villa della Farnesina, a lush house of the late Roman republican period that was discovered in 1879 along the banks of the Tiber and believed to have been the home of Giulia, daughter of the emperor Augustus.

The lighting on the panel aims to reconstruct the effect that flickering candlelight would have had 2,000 years ago, leaving the hosts or guests of the house with the impression that the tiny figures were walking or the tiny ships sailing.

Boy would I love to see that effect. A lot of times modern museum lighting really doesn’t covey the same feeling, especially when the piece being lit originally came from a wall in a house that had relatively few windows to begin with.

(Wee digression: Roman architecture wasn’t big on windows, hence the peristyle garden, which brings natural light to all adjacent rooms without the noise and stench of a street-facing window.

Although Romans did use glass for windows from the early Empire on, they used them for insulation in places like public baths to keep out drafts, so they often weren’t even particularly transparent. In villas, windows were just holes up high in the wall.)

Back on topic, the exhibit opened yesterday and will close on January 17th. The museum will be hosting free companion lectures on Roman painting as well, in an effort to underscore the importance of painting as a medium to the ancients.

The curator points out in this handy Q & A that we forget that the primary medium for Greek and Roman arts was painting, not sculpture. The latter just survives a lot better.

So this exhibit is trying to spotlight how important a cultural aspect it was, how color and paint were everywhere, even though the paintings we have are home decorations rather than major important works like, say, the ancient Roman equivalent of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Imagine what the REALLY fancy paintings must have been like. I can’t even grasp that, frankly. You can see more of the paintings from the exhibit in this slideshow from an Italian newspaper.

Scuderie del Quirinale museum is worth seeing in and of itself, btw. The Quirinale Palace was originally a summer residence and conference center for the Pope, then the official residence of the King of Italy after reunification, and currently the official residence of the President.

The stables were renovated and made into a museum only 10 years ago, and they don’t look like any stables you might be familiar with. They were built in grand style in the 1700’s.

Oh, and how’s this for a view:

Largest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold found in UK

September 24, 2009

Ancient, Museums, Treasures

With almost 3 times the amount of gold found at the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial 80 years ago, plus pounds of silver, decorative objects and weapons, the importance of this hoard of Saxon treasure cannot be overstated.

Experts are literally crying over it and calling it a find on a par with the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Yet again it was a metal detector hobbyist who literally struck gold this July in a farm field in Staffordshire. Terry Herbert lives on disability in public housing. When all is said and done, he and the landowner may be millionaires and then some.

The weapons and helmet decorations, coins and Christian crosses amount to more than 1500 pieces, with hundreds still embedded in blocks of soil. It adds up to five kilos of gold – three times the amount found in the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial in 1939 – and 2.5 kilos of silver, and may be the swag from a spectacularly successful raiding party of warlike Mercians, some time around 700AD. […]

The gold includes spectacular gem studded pieces decorated with tiny interlaced beasts, which were originally the ornamentation for Anglo Saxon swords of princely quality: the experts would judge one a spectacular discovery, but the field has yielded 84 pommel caps and 71 hilt collars, a find without precedent.

Interestingly, there are no female adornments in the hoard. No jewelry, no brooches, no dress fittings, items which in past finds have formed the bulk of the treasure. That’s one of the reasons archaeologists think it may be the spoils of Mercian battles.

There are 3 crosses in the hoard. The largest has been folded, possibly for ease of transport, which suggests the possessors may not have been Christians.

The find has been kept on the down low — the exact location still has not been published — while archaeologists finished excavating the treasure. The last pieces were removed a couple of weeks ago.

Now they’re at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery where they will be on display from tomorrow until October 13th.

After that it’s off to the British Museum, where it will be valuated by more giddy experts as local museums scramble to raise enough funds to purchase the treasure for their galleries.

Images courtesy of www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk

The skeletons of Paris and Helen found?

September 23, 2009

Ancient

Okay not really. I was just going for the splashy headline with the Paris and Helen thing.

But the skeletons of a man and woman were indeed found buried together in Troy, in what is now Turkey. The remains haven’t been carbon dated yet, but pottery found near them dates to 1200 BC, the time of the Trojan War.

Ernst Pernicka, a University of Tubingen professor of archaeometry who is leading excavations on the site in northwestern Turkey, said the bodies were found near a defense line within the city built in the late Bronze age.

The discovery could add to evidence that Troy’s lower area was bigger in the late Bronze Age than previously thought, changing scholars’ perceptions about the city of the “Iliad.”

The lower parts of the the bodies are missing, and it could be that the pottery is from one period and the skeletons from a later period. The bones could have been buried 400 years later in layers VI and VII.

Troy VII is the one archaeologists think is Homeric Troy. It was destroyed by war, whereas Troy VI seems to have been destroyed by an earthquake and no human remains have ever been found there.

Museum of Chinese in America reopens in NYC

September 22, 2009

Modern(ish), Museums

The Museum of Chinese in America was founded almost 30 years ago as the Chinatown History Project, a small community institution dedicated to preserving the oral histories, artifacts and records documenting Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Over the decades as the collection increased in size, the scope of the museum has widened to include documenting not just the history of NYC’s Chinatown, but of the Chinese experience in the United States.

Now it has moved into newly renovated digs six times larger than the original. Formerly an industrial machine repair shop, the new museum space was designed by board member and renown architect Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.

This core exhibition, “With a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America,” was created by the historian John Kuo Wei Tchen, a co-founder of the museum, along with Cynthia Ai-fen Lee. It depends less on artifacts like the cap gun or the display of irons used by once-familiar Chinese laundry establishments than on the arc of the narrative.

One side of some galleries tells of struggle and hardship, showing images of the riots that led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, in which unskilled Chinese immigrants were barred. Also on display are the crib sheets an aspiring immigrant once studied to convince officials at Angel Island (the San Francisco counterpart to Ellis Island) that he was more than a “paper son” whose false documents affirmed a connection to someone already in America.

The most fascinating galleries are compressed displays of how the image of Chinese-Americans was shaped into stereotypes in early 20th-century culture, ranging from Fu Manchu’s villainy to chop suey’s homogenized exoticism. The position of Chinese-Americans became still more complicated when China was an ally during World War II, a Communist enemy in the 1950s and a warily watched trading partner and political rival in the 1980s and ’90s.

The other side of the main gallery is dedicated to Chinese-Americans who succeeded in their fields despite the obstacles thrown in their path, like Dr. Faith Sai So Leong, the first female Chinese dentist in America, and Yan Phou Lee, the first Chinese student elected to Phi Beta Kappa, as well as contemporary Chinese-American luminaries like Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Not only is the collection fascinating (and ever-expanding), but the space itself looks beautiful. Here’s the entrance with video installations by Chinese-American artists on the walls:

Bronze Age crypt found under Qatna royal palace

September 21, 2009

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating under the ancient royal palace of Qatna in what is now Syria have uncovered a 3500-year-old crypt untouched by grave robbers.

The crypt has two chambers — an anteroom and the grave room where the human remains are — and is 16 feet by 21 feet in dimension.

Thirty skulls within suggest that a corresponding number of people were buried there, and bones stacked in groups among splinters of wood may indicate a secondary burial, the statement said.

Ceramic and well-preserved stone vessels of granite and alabaster, along with gold jewellery and other artefacts were also within the crypt. The team also found a small sculpture of a monkey holding a vessel used for cosmetics and an ivory human statuette.

The bones could well be the remains of royal family members or people in their household. There are no inscriptions, so even though of course the bones will be examined thoroughly, it’s not likely archaeologists will be able to identify the remains.

Qatna was a major kingdom in the Bronze Age. It was a trading hub between Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, Anatolia and Egypt with as many as 20,000 inhabitants in the city at its peak, 1800 – 1600 B.C. The city was finally burned down in 1340 B.C.

Previous excavations at the palace have uncovered one other unlooted grave packed with goodies. The artifacts from that find will be on display in the Wuerttemberg State Museum in Stuttgart come October 17th. This will be the first time Qatna artifacts will be exhibited in Europe.