Month: September 2011

Apocalyptic painting restored 83 years after flood

Modern(ish), Museums

In the wee hours of January 7, 1928, the Thames, swollen by heavy December snowfall and a sudden thaw, burst its banks near Lambeth Bridge right across from the Tate Gallery. Water flooded the street and all the buildings on it, including the nine galleries in the basement of the museum. Tate Gallery director Charles Aitken marshaled staff and volunteers to pump out the water which had reached depths of between five and eight feet, and then remove all the sodden paintings to the dry upper galleries.

Among the paintings removed from the flooded basement galleries was The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, an 8-foot apocalyptic vision of Vesuvius’ 79 A.D. eruption painted in 1821 by John Martin. It had been completely submerged in the flood waters and was severely damaged. It was caked in mud, the paint was flaking off and part of the canvas had torn leaving The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum almost bisected and crucially missing an erupting Vesuvius. Curators at the time considered it a total loss. They rolled it in tissue and put it in storage.

When the Tate decided last year to stage a major exhibition of John Martin’s work, they unrolled the The Destruction for the first time in 82 years. They found the painting in better condition than they expected. Sure, it was still coated in dirt and the paint was still flaking, but it hadn’t disintegrated so the loose paint flakes could be carefully reattached to the canvas and the losses retouched. The missing section was still missing, of course, but given the importance of the painting, the Tate staff decided to take the plunge and fill in even the huge blank.

It was computer technology that made the replacement of the missing part possible. Experts examined the area on a smaller version of the painting Martin made and on his preparatory sketch for the large one. Restorer Sarah Maisey then created four digital versions that were shown to a test audience. The audience was filmed looking at the four images and their eye movements tracked. The eye-tracking results proved that the eyes of the viewers were primarily focused on the undamaged part of the canvas.

If you look very closely at the painting you can see which is Martin’s brushwork and which is the work of restorer Sarah Maisey. “I’ve tried to tone down a lot of the detail,” she said. “I wanted the overall impact of Martin’s work to have been retained but ultimately wanted people to be able to appreciate what was left of John Martin’s work.”

Maisey admitted that restoring the work of Martin had been a responsibility. “As a conservator you don’t normally have to paint large sections, you do small filling in of losses, so this was something quite different. I think he’d be happy. His work was about impact.”

The restoration is reversible should future generations think it wrong, but for now it goes on display at the biggest Martin show ever.

John Martin: Apocalypse runs from September 21st to January 15, 2012, and is the not only the first major Martin exhibit in 30 years, but is also largest display of his work ever seen. Visitors will be able to see 120 of his works, from immense Biblical and historical apocalypse scenes, to sketches, watercolors, mezzotints and even his engineering plans.

John Martin’s paintings were dismissed by the snooty art academy established as lurid and “common.” Nineteenth century art critic and taste arbiter John Ruskin said “Martin’s works are merely a common manufacture, as much makeable to order as a tea-tray or a coal-scuttle.” Of course, John Ruskin famously refused to have sex with his wife when on their marriage night he was shocked to find out that women have pubic hair, so consider the source.

He had a vast fan base among the plebes, though, and artists in a variety of media have felt his influence. Stop-motion innovator Ray Harryhausen modeled his Olympus on the city on a hill in Martin’s Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon. George Lucas was inspired by Satan presiding at the Infernal Council (1824-26), one of Martin’s engraved illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, when designing the Senate hall in The Phantom Menace.

Comic book writer Alan Moore is another of Martin’s contemporary fans in the creative world. He artfully described Martin’s The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as: “This is the terror of the world’s edge, is the vertigo of an accelerated culture. Out beyond the lights of every city, every town and every century, this is the abyss that abides.”

Stone Age skulls mounted on stakes found in Sweden

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating a Stone Age lake bed in Motala, Sweden, have unearthed two skull impaled on spikes. The skulls were discovered with the stakes still firmly embedded inside them, reaching from the base of the skull to the top of the cranium.

Other remains were also found at the site, among them skull fragments from 11 people of varying ages and animal bones. Radiocarbon dating confirms that all of the bones are the same age: 8,000 years old. That makes these heads on spikes the oldest ones found in the world, and by a lot.

The lake bed, a shallow lake during the Neolithic, was used as a ceremonial burial ground during the Mesolithic era.

Archaeologists are exploring two theories to explain why the human skulls were mounted on wooden stakes before being placed in the lake bed

“One thought is that it was part of some sort of secondary burial ritual where the skulls were removed from dead bodies that had initially been placed elsewhere,” said Hallberg.

“After the soft tissue had rotted away, the skulls were removed and placed on the stakes before being placed in the shallow lake.”

Another theory is that the mounted skulls are trophies brought back from battles with other settlers in the area.

“It may have been a way to prove one’s success on the battlefield,” Hallberg explained.

DNA and isotope analysis might help fill in some of the blanks, like if everyone in buried on the site was related or if they were raised in the area or came from elsewhere. If they’re all part of the same family, it seems unlikely that the impaled skulls were battle trophies.

This excavation site has been a regular source of unique discoveries over the past two years. It gained immediate notoriety last summer when a Stone Age antler bone dildo was discovered by the same team that found the spiked skulls. Then last October the team discovered a treasure trove of artifacts — parts of a bow, a paddle, an axe handle and blade — all made out 9000-year-old wood. The bow was the first of its kind ever found in Sweden. That’s the miracle of sodden earth and peat in action again, keeping perishable materials from perishing.

Minneapolis museum to return looted vase to Italy

Ancient, Looting, Modern(ish), Museums

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) has agreed to return a 5th century B.C. red-figure volute krater (a vessel used to mix water and wine) that was part of Giacomo Medici’s hoard of looted antiquities to Italy. The museum purchased it from antiquities dealer/high society fence Robin Symes in 1983.

According to the museum website, the krater is probably the work of the Methyse Painter and depicts a Dionysian parade which stars a child satyr riding on the shoulders of a maenad. This is the only known vase painting of a child satyr getting a piggy back ride from a maenad. There are satyrs carrying child satyrs, women holding human babies, but no other women carrying child satyrs.

That unique depiction is key to the repatriation saga. When in 1995 the Italian art police raided a Geneva Freeport warehouse that antiquities dealer/fence Giacomo Medici (later sentenced to 10 years for antiquities theft) had stuffed full of looted artifacts, they also found a cache of 10,000 Polaroid pictures of newly excavated, unrestored ancient artifacts Medici had already sold.

That massive score of photographs has been the underpinning of many of the recent legal and diplomatic avenues Italy has pursued to reclaim looted antiquities from U.S. museums. Among the 10,000 was a picture of a volute krater depicting a Dionysian parade with a child satyr riding on the shoulders of a maenad. The vessel in the picture still bore the mud and salt encrustations from its fresh excavation.

In 2005, Italian authorities published a list of artifacts in eight major US museums that they had reason to believe had been illegally excavated, exported and sold. Among them was the child satyr krater at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The Italian police believe the vase was probably looted from Rutigliano, a town in the Puglia region (the heel of the boot) that was once colonized by Greece and is a mother lode of Greek vases because they were so prized they were often buried with their owners.

The museum of course claimed that it had bought the artifact “in good faith” (they always say that) and that according to their information (ie, the fictional ownership history Symes invented so the buyer could later claim to have purchased the stolen object “in good faith”), the vase had been in private collections in Switzerland (Canadian girlfriend alert!) for 15 years prior to the 1983 sale, pushing its fake provenance back two years before the 1970 cutoff established by the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.

According to Kaywin Feldman, director and president of the MIA, in the wake of Italy’s allegations the museum launched an investigation on the provenance of the volute krater. The investigation somehow fell through the cracks after some staff changes, until Feldman entirely on her own “out of curiosity” contacted the Italian culture ministry last year to pursue the case.

That conversation led to an exchange of information which eventually determined the MIA’s krater had likely been illegally excavated. The MIA’s board of directors voted in March to deaccession the object and return it to the Italian government. The Italian government for its part has stated that it is thankful for the return of the krater.

The Italian government is unfailingly flattering to the museums they bust once they’ve secured a return, even when they don’t really deserve it. The six-year delay between the Italian claim and the repatriation decision was ludicrous. That Medici Polaroid is as close to undeniable evidence that vase was looted as it gets. Polaroid didn’t even make the camera model that took the picture until 1972, so there was no way that Swiss collection cover story could be remotely possible.

There is no firm date for the return of the krater. Talks are ongoing. Meanwhile, it will remain at the Minneapolis Institute of Art for at least another month, probably more, and they’ve added a blurb about the investigation to the display.

Riddick’s David Twohy to direct lost Leonardo film

Modern(ish), Multimedia, Renaissance

Leonardo da Vinci’s lost mural, The Battle of Anghiari, will be the subject of a heist caper movie written and directed by David Twohy, writer and director of the science fiction classics starring Vin Diesel Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick. It will be called, deplorably enough, The Leonardo Job which is so absurdly derivative I hope very much it will be changed at some point in the production process.

Even if it stays the same, I fear the name may be the best part.

An action thriller about the heist of the “lost” Leonardo da Vinci painting The Battle of Anghiari; the story involves two rival master thieves hired to go to Florence to track down the “mythical” painting. These experts use high tech and old tricks to prove the painting exists and pinpoint its location – hidden behind another masterpiece. They are forced to combine skills when their schemes to steal the painting get more complicated and dangerous after they discover they are not the only ones pursuing the hidden treasure.

I’m curious to see exactly how they plan to steal a mural. Murals are on walls, you see, from the Latin murus meaning wall. This particular wall is rather large, too. It will require some seriously impressive high tech gadgetry to excise it without anyone noticing.

They haven’t released a production schedule yet, so we don’t know when the movie will be released. Twohy has been working with Vin Diesel on the long-awaited third Riddick movie so Leonardo might have to get in line.

Cynicism aside, I hope somehow this seeming train wreck will turn out to be a rollicking good time that doesn’t annoy me at all. Pitch Black is a brilliant movie, and I love The Chronicles of Riddick with all its flaws. It never fails to draw me in when it’s on cable.

Giant stone designs in Middle East seen from the air

Ancient

Enormous stone structures that can only be seen from the air, like Peru’s Nazca Lines, have been discovered in the desert lava fields of the Middle East. New satellite imagery and a program of aerial photography in Jordan have allowed archaeologists to locate thousands of these mysterious structures. They come in a variety of shapes, the most popular one being a spoked wheel, and can range in size from 82 feet to 230 feet.

According to University of Western Australia professor David Kennedy, whose team has been involved in the aerial photography project documenting ancient structures in Jordan, there are more of these giant figures in Jordan alone than in all of Peru. They also cover more surface area and they are older.

Kennedy’s new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.

The structures are remote and so difficult to see from the ground (even when you know they’re there), that thus far the wheels have not been excavated by archaeologists. That means we really don’t know how old they are. They look prehistoric but could be much more recent. Some wheels have been found on top of kites but never vice versa, so we know the kite shaped structures — which can be as much as 9,000 years old — predate the wheel shaped ones.

Cairns have been discovered on some of the sites, so perhaps those locations used the giant stonework as part of a cemetery ritual. There’s so much variety, though, discoveries at one wheel can’t be generalized to draw conclusions about the structures as a group.

Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. “Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable,” Kennedy said.

In Saudi Arabia, Kennedy’s team has found wheel styles that are quite different: Some are rectangular and are not wheels at all; others are circular but contain two spokes forming a bar often aligned in the same direction that the sun rises and sets in the Middle East.

The ones in Jordan and Syria, on the other hand, have numerous spokes and do not seem to be aligned with any astronomical phenomena. “On looking at large numbers of these, over a number of years, I wasn’t struck by any pattern in the way in which the spokes were laid out,” Kennedy said.

You can browse a Flickrfull of pictures from the Jordan aerial photography program here.