January 2010 – Page 6 – The History Blog

Bologna to restore its medieval canals

January 6, 2010

Mayor of Bologna Flavio Delbono announced Tuesday that the city will be reopening one of the canals in the historic center of the city.

The canal system, built between the 12th and 16th centuries to accommodate the ever-increasing transportation needs of the city with the oldest university in Europe (founded in 1088), was paved over by roads and parking lots in the post-war boom of the 1950s. You can still catch a glimpse of bits and bobs of the old canals, but they’d long since been superseded by cars.

Now choked by smog and perpetually overshadowed as a tourist attraction by its more famous neighbors Milan, Florence and Venice, Bologna is looking to beautify and reinvigorate the historic center.

A parking lot and part of the road would be torn up between Via Riva Reno and Via Galliera, revealing not only the water underneath but also the remains of an Ancient Roman bridge. The two banks of the canal would be connected by a footbridge, while cars would have the use of one side of the waterway. While Bologna is unlikely to ever rival Venice, said Delbono, more waterways will be uncovered if this first stage goes well, and Bologna could eventually join the ranks of Europe’s major rediscovered ”canal cities”, such as Strasbourg, Bruges and Birmingham. He said the waterways would not only make the historic centre more pleasant for Bolognesi, they would also boost tourism and could even be used for commercial activities.

No start date was announced, but this initital phase should take about 18 months. If it’s successful, other canals might follow. That’s a big if, though, because like every old city in Europe, car traffic is a major issue so the loss of street and parking space could turn out to be more of a city planning headache than the canals are an advantage.

If it does work out, there are 5 main canals still running underneath of the streets of Bologna which could be revealed one at a time. The Navile had its own port and linked Bologna to the major thoroughfare of the Po river. The Reno and the Savena brought water to the city and the other canals. The Cavaticcio and Moline powered grain and silk mills. Bologna was famed for its silk industry, considered the height of European silk production technology from the 15th century to the 18th.

You can actually tour these underground canals now, as well as some tunnels from Bologna’s rich Roman and Etruscan past. Bologna has been a major city since it was called Felsina under the Etruscans in the 6th century B.C.

Bologna is also famously progressive. It was the first city in Europe to abolish serfdom in 1256, and it was the only Italian city in the 15th century that allowed women to practice any profession, some could even get a degree from the university.

Huge tomb found in Saqqara

January 5, 2010

Ancient, Treasures

Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed the largest tomb ever found in the necropolis of Saqqara south of Cairo. Carved out of limestone, the tomb dates to to the 26th Dynasty (664 -525 B.C.) and was found near the entrance of the necropolis.

The tomb consists of a big hall hewn out of the limestone rock.

There are a number of small rooms and passageways where ancient coffins, skeletons and well-preserved clay pots were discovered, as well as the mummies of eagles.

Egypt’s chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, who announced the discovery, said that early investigations showed that although the tomb dated back to the 26th Dynasty, it had been used several times.

It was certainly opened several times, and appears to have been robbed at the end of the Roman era, around the 5th c. A.D. It is so large it took Hawass two hours just to walk around inside of it.

Various stories have said the mummified birds were either eagles, falcons or hawks, so I’m not sure which one is correct. If they were representatives of the god Horus (which would make sense in a funerary context), they were probably falcons as he is usually depicted as a man with the head of a falcon.

The team also found another limestone tomb right next to it, this one sealed with many clay pots and ancient coffins scattered around.

Noah’s Ark was a round raft

January 4, 2010

Ancient, Treasures

A newly translated ancient Babylonian clay tablet dating to 1,700 B.C. reveals new details of the global flood story. Dozens of clay tablets tell the tale of the one righteous man and his ark full of animals, but this one tablet is the only one that actually describes the vessel.

The tablet in question was owned by RAF veteran Leonard Simmons who got it somewhere in the Middle East when he was serving there right after the war. He had a chest full of tablets, pottery, seals and various other artifacts that he had bought at bazaars and whatnot, but although he showed them to experts, they all dismissed them as commonplace.

When he passed away and his son Douglas inherited the collection, he took the tablet to British Museum cuneiform expert Dr. Irving Finkel. Dr. Finkel is one of the few people in the world who can sight-read cuneiform and he knew at first glance that this was no common clay tablet.

“In all the images ever made people assumed the ark was, in effect, an ocean-going boat, with a pointed stem and stern for riding the waves – so that is how they portrayed it,” said Finkel. “But the ark didn’t have to go anywhere, it just had to float, and the instructions are for a type of craft which they knew very well. It’s still sometimes used in Iran and Iraq today, a type of round coracle which they would have known exactly how to use to transport animals across a river or floods.”

Finkel’s research throws light on the familiar Mesopotamian story, which became the account in Genesis, in the Old Testament, of Noah and the ark that saved his menagerie from the waters which drowned every other living thing on earth.

In his translation, the god who has decided to spare one just man speaks to Atram-Hasis, a Sumerian king who lived before the flood and who is the Noah figure in earlier versions of the ark story. “Wall, wall! Reed wall, reed wall! Atram-Hasis, pay heed to my advice, that you may live forever! Destroy your house, build a boat; despise possessions And save life! Draw out the boat that you will built with a circular design; Let its length and breadth be the same.”

It closes with Atram-Hasis telling the builder he’s leaving behind to drown to make sure he caulks the door behind Atram-Hasis when he last enters the boat.

Round bundle boats called quffa are still found on the Euphrates today, very similar to ones found on Assyrian wall carvings from the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.). In the 20th century some were made that could transport 16 tons of grain and dozens of animals, so the idea of round coracle ark is not as crazy as it may sound.

Picasso’s “little guitar” found in a shoebox

January 3, 2010

Looting, Modern(ish), Museums

A wee wooden guitar made by Pablo Picasso has been recovered 3 years after it was stolen by a con-man. Picasso made it for his daughter Paloma, but once it was finished he gave it instead to his friend, Italian artist Giuseppe Vittorio Parisi.

Parisi kept it for decades, but when he was 92 (in 2007), an unnamed “businessman” persuaded him to part with it. The fraudster promised he’d create a special special wood and glass display case for the piece, but once he had it, he disappeared never to be seen again.

When Parisi died in January 2009, his widow Wanda asked the police to retrieve the guitar. The Carabinieri searched for almost a year, finally finding the piece in a shoebox in the closet of a luxury apartment in Pomezia, a town south of Rome. The businessman has been charged with fraud and is currently out on bail.

A Picasso expert has authenticated the guitar, thanks in part to an inscription of “Paloma” in the artist’s own hand. Now the little guitar is on its way to Maccagno, a small town on Lake Maggiore where Parisi was born and where his vast collection of art is on display in at the Civic Museum of Contemporary Art.

Small London museum scores unknown Chagall

January 2, 2010

Modern(ish), Museums

The London Jewish Museum of Art is a small museum in St. John’s Wood, London, which opened less than 10 years ago. It was built up around the collection of the Ben Uri Gallery’s, a Jewish artists’ society begun in 1915, and has been steadily adding works from notable artists over the 9 years of its existence.

But it’s the most recent purchase which has really put the museum on the map. David Glasser, one of the museum’s chairmen, found a previously unknown Chagall in the catalog of a small French auction house. The piece is a gouache, a painting made from opaque watercolors mixed with gum, from 1945. It’s one of several Holocaust-themed paintings made by Marc Chagall after he fled Nazi-occupied France in 1941.

The gouache on heavy paper, which Chagall signed and titled himself lightly with a pencil in Russian — “Apocalypse in Lilac, Capriccio” — employs one of his familiar motifs, an image of a crucified Jesus, which he used as a metaphor for persecuted Jewry. But this crucifixion, painted in New York, where Chagall settled for several years, is one of the most brutal and disturbing ever created by an artist primarily known for his brightly colored folkloric visions.

“Apocalypse” shows a naked Christ screaming at a Nazi storm trooper below the cross, who has a backwards swastika on his arm, a Hitler-like mustache and a serpentine tail. Another small figure can be seen crucified and a second being hanged, and a man appears to be poised to stab a child. A damaged, upside-down clock falls from the sky. The darkness and directness of the work may have been a response not only to the war but also to the death of Chagall’s wife, Bella, a year earlier from a viral infection that might have been treated if not for wartime medicine shortages. […]

“Although in many of his works Chagall had reacted to events in Germany, he usually did not depict them but used symbols — such as the crucifixion, a Jew holding a Torah, a mother protecting her child or a falling angel — to suggest what was happening there,” writes Ziva Amishai-Maisels, a Chagall scholar and professor emeritus at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a catalog to accompany the exhibition of the painting. “Although he still used some of these symbols in ‘Apocalypse,’ he combined them with the reality of the Holocaust in a manner that was very rare in his work. This and the way he depicted the conflict between the Nazi and the naked Christ make this a unique work.”

Chagall never sold “Apocalypse”. His son David sold it to a private collector two years after his father’s death, where it remained for 25 years until it was put up for auction. The estimate was a surprisingly affordable 25,000 – 35,000 euros ($36,000 – $50,000) which the London Jewish Museum could actually afford.

Just to be sure the price didn’t triple as experts thought it easily could, Glasser approached the Art Fund, a British philanthropic organization that gives institutions grants to help purchase expensive works. They guaranteed him an extra 100,000 euros (ca $143,000). He ended up not needing it. Maybe it’s the somber theme, maybe it was the sparsely attended auction, but for whatever reason, Glasser was able to buy “Apocalypse” for 30,000 euros (ca $43,000).

The painting goes on display at the Osborne Samuel gallery in Mayfair this Thursday. At the end of the month, it will join the The London Jewish Museum of Art‘s permanent collection.