October 2009 – Page 4 – The History Blog

CSI Leonardo

October 16, 2009

An unsigned chalk, ink and pencil portrait of a Renaissance beauty known as “La Bella Principessa” (the beautiful princess) has been attributed to Leonardo using a method more commonly associated with police procedural dramas: fingerprint analysis.

Forensic expert Peter Paul Biro found the fingerprint and partial palm print on the canvas and matched it to a fingerprint found on Leonardo’s “St. Jerome in the Wilderness” in the Vatican.

Biro examined multispectral images of the drawing taken by the Lumiere Technology laboratory in Paris, which used a special digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.

“Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works,” Biro said. “I was able to make use of multispectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint.”

Alessandro Vezzosi, director of a museum dedicated to Leonardo in the artist’s hometown of Vinci, Italy, said Wednesday he was “very happy” to hear about the fingerprint analysis, saying it confirmed his own conclusion that the portrait can be attributed to Leonardo with “reasonable certainty.”

This is great news for the Swiss collector who owns the piece. He bought it for a ridiculously low sum last year when Christie’s sold it as an anonymous 19th c. German school piece.

If the attribution holds, this will be the first new Leonardo to be discovered in over a hundred years. It could be valued at something in the neighborhood of $150 million. Bought for $19,000, sold for $150 million. I doubt there’s ever been a better return on investment in the art world.

Needless to say, Kate Ganz, the New York art dealer who bought the portrait in 1998 for around the amount she sold it to the Swiss collector for 9 years later, insists that this new information doesn’t change anything. As far as she’s concerned, it’s absolutely not a Leonardo la la la I can’t hear you.

I can’t say I blame her for sticking her head in the sand. How do you sleep at night after having had something so beautiful, so precious in your hands for a decade unrecognized, only to give it away at cost?

Ancient footprints under the Lod mosaic

October 15, 2009

Ancient, Treasures

The huge and beautiful Lod mosaic was removed for conservation. Underneath, archaeologists have found multiple footprints left behind by the workers who prepared the bedding for the mosaic together 1700 years ago.

Some of them are of bare feet, some of them shod, and there are a variety of sizes: 34, 37, 42 and 44 European which are men’s sizes 3, 5, 8 1/2 and 10 1/2 in American measurements. (Granted people were smaller then, but size 3? That has to have been a kid, right?)

“Based on the concentration of foot and sandal prints it seems that the group of builders tamped the mortar in place with their feet,” [Jacques Neguer, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority Art Conservation department] said. “The mosaic consists of three parts that different artists built, probably in different periods.”

He said that there were different kinds of art on the mosaic, and that the conservators could see that the hands that affixed the tesserae were different: a trained eye also recognizes that the preparation which was done prior to the work is different.

Neguer says that part of the process of conservation is to clean the bedding after the mosaic has been removed and study how it was put together. Sometimes they find sketches or grid lines the artists scratched into the plaster so they could plan where the tesserae were going.

That’s what happened under the Lod mosaic. They found incised lines under a vine segment (the middle rectangle in the picture on the right) indicating where the tiles were to be laid, and on that same layer they found the group of footprints.

This was a major lucky break on their part because even with the greatest of skilled conservators, sometimes the mosaic can’t be lifted so cleanly off its bedding.

The prints will be removed for conservation as well, and will eventually be displayed in the new facility built to display the mosaic itself.

What a rush for the conservators to literally be able to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors.

Only complete Roman cameo glass vase found

October 14, 2009

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures

Bonham’s has announced that they’ve received a uniquely complete and intricate Roman cameo glass vase.

Roman cameo glass is extremely rare — there are only 15 known pieces — and the previous top-of-the-line item was the beautiful Portland vase which is missing its base and has only 7 carved figures on the surface. This complete vase has 30 figures.

It dates from somewhere between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D., and stands a dramatic 13 inches (33.5 cm) high.

This type of vase is formed from two layers of cobalt blue glass with a layer of white on top which is cut down after cooling to create the cameo-style decoration.

A spokesman added: “Items of this kind were produced, it is thought, within a period of only two generations. […]

The recently identified vase is also said to be more complex than others of its kind Bonhams experts believe that this magnificent artefact could rewrite the history books on cameo vases.

Unlike the Portland vase, it still has its base and lower register and will therefore add significantly to the archaeological understanding of these vessels.

It’s not for sale. Yet. The owner is a “private European collector” who is currently passing it around various museums and experts for further study.

Giant red flag right there. Something’s not kosher about this, most likely a little something called loot. A piece of this stature doesn’t come out of nowhere. If it had been in any known collections, even private ones, somebody would have documented it. For it to surface now with no history of ownership … Well, it doesn’t bode well.

It could be perfectly legitimate. It could have been kept a secret in some reclusive millionaire’s castle for hundreds of years. It’s just that those kinds of stories tend to spring from the pages of novels rather than newspapers.

For Bonham’s to have been allowed to publicize it suggests they’re priming the market for a major sale. In this day and age, the old “anonymous private collector” shtick might not fly, especially not with such an extraordinary piece.

Abraham Lincoln and New York

October 13, 2009

Modern(ish), Museums, Social policy

The New York Historical Society is putting on a fascinating exhibit about Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with New York. From his first campaign until his assassination, New York loomed large for Lincoln.

Its 35 electoral votes were key to his first victory, and the picture Matthew Brady took of him after his famous Cooper Union address in 1860 played a major role in changing his rail-splitter prairie hick image into the dignified statesman image that we see him as today.

New York was also a whole different kind of battlefield during the war. It was the Union’s primary provider of soldiers, money, media. Abolitionism was strong in the state and well-represented politically, but so was some truly heinous racism. The 1863 Draft Riots went on for 4 days and caused more death and destruction than anything besides the war itself.

Lincoln’s supporters formed an organization, the Wide Awakes, with its own paramilitary uniforms and songs. In 1860 30,000 Wide Awakes marched in a five-hour torchlight parade through New York City streets; one of their torches, amazingly, is on display here. But the same number of marchers gathered in 1863 for a demonstration against Lincoln and his policies.

This exhibition steers deftly in these churning waters, pointing out that even allies had differing shades of opinion. Lincoln’s advocates became known as the Loyalists and are portrayed in an image as if seated at an upper-crust dining room table, paying homage to a strong central Union. […]

There is less complexity here in the portrait of the Democratic Copperheads, who are shown at a tavern, perhaps because one of their leaders, Fernando Wood, was a bar owner before he became mayor of New York. But the Copperheads also included wealthy merchants who saw their fortunes threatened by the end of trade with the South, as well as ardent defenders of slavery, like Samuel F. B. Morse.

One of the most fascinating artifacts here is a book Lincoln owned of satirical limericks attacking these opponents. (“There once was a Copperhead vile…”) A touch screen allows you to read every page.

For those of us who aren’t going to be in New York between Friday and March 25th, the exhibition website is nicely set up, with lots of pictures of detailed explanations.

Examples of artifacts from the Draft Riots:

Avoid the draft by beating a black man, Draft Riot cartoon, 1863

One of many examples of racist anti-abolitionist propaganda, this one of the “look what’ll happen if Lincoln and the abolitionists have their way” school:

Miscegenation, or The Millennium of Abolitionism, 1864

Mary Rose artifacts on display for the first time

October 12, 2009

Museums, Renaissance, Treasures

The Mary Rose was Henry VIII’s favorite ship. It was the first ship that could fire a full cannon broadside and although it’s small by today’s standards at 126 feet (38.5 meters) in length, it was the largest ship in the Tudor fleet.

It sank off the coast of Plymouth in July 1545 before Henry’s very eyes. Nobody knows exactly why, although of course everyone’s got a theory. Five hundred hands went down with her, along with a huge amount of treasure and every day Tudoriana. Only 35 men survived, the ones in the rigging above the deck when the ship went down.

The wreck was pulled out of the ocean in 1982, and since then has been on display upright in a dry dock at very low temperature and very high humidity of 95% in the Mary Rose Ship Hall in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

Until September 20th you could go see it, but the hall is closed now as they begin to build a new $55 million museum that will suit the particular needs of the wreck and its 19,000 artifacts.

The museum will reflect the original ship’s structure with Nelson’s HMS Victory, docked alongside.

It [the Mary Rose] will continue to be sprayed with preserving polyethylene glycol – a water-based wax solution – until 2011 and then it will be carefully “baked dry” into 2012, when the new museum is due to open in time for the Olympics.

The Mary Rose will be on display in the new museum protected behind glass barriers while the conservation work is completed. The glass is set to be removed in 2016.

The 19,000 artifacts have been in temperature-controlled storage, mainly, with only a few displayed at various times. As part of a fundraising push to get the last $6 million needed for the museum, the Mary Rose Trust has allowed more artifacts than ever before to be filmed.

And what an amazing grouping it is. It includes everyday items like 70 nit combs, some with dead nits still in them, the oldest known fiddle, beer tankards, shoes, boots, stylish manpurses, manicure sets, and this seriously scary metal syringe sailors used for injecting mercury into their urethrae as a cure for syphilis.

Mercury! Injected into your peehole! Spyhilis must have been truly heinous for people to embrace such a cure. Here’s the syringe in question accompanied by two packets of field bandages:

It’s remarkable how many easily perishable items like those bandages were found on the wreck. Here are some Tudor sailor accessories:

Here are some personal grooming effects:

Then there’s the tankard in which a sailor would receive his daily ration of beer, which may sound a little weird to us today, but the beer was likely weak enough not to dehydrate and was certainly less teeming with pathogens than any water they could have carried on board.

To find out how you can help preserve this incredible slice of Tudor life in a proper museum deserving of its awesomeness, see the Mary Rose Trust website.

They’ve got a neat initiative asking for 500 individuals, schools, businesses and organisations to become the Mary Rose’s “new crew”. Each crew member pledges to raise £500 (ca. $790) towards a £250,000 goal, all of which goes to the new museum.