June 2012 – Page 4 – The History Blog

Ancient church in Roman Forum to reopen restored

June 15, 2012

After more than a decade of restoration work, Santa Maria Antiqua, one of the earliest and most historically significant Christian churches in Rome, will be open to tour groups by invitation only starting in September of this year, then open to the public at large in 2013. Built out of part of a palace complex on the Palatine dating to the reign of Emperor Domitian (reigned 81-96 A.D.), the building was converted into a Christian church in the sixth century. It was the second Christian church consecrated in the Roman Forum, the religious and political center of the ancient city, and thanks to various sackings and demolitions of later structures, it remains one of only two Christian churches in the Forum today. (The other is Santi Cosma e Damiano, built a few decades before Santa Maria.)

Some of the materials used and style of the paintings are characteristically Byzantine, an unusual approach in the city of Rome, perhaps the product of artists and workshops from the Eastern Empire. Over the next three centuries, the walls were extensively frescoed, with later works sometimes painted over earlier ones. These layered paintings provide unique insight into the development of Byzantine and early medieval art, especially since much Byzantine religious art was destroyed by 8th and 9th century Iconoclasm in the East. Thankfully, Byzantine control over the West was weak by that time. Popes Gregory II and Gregory III rejected Byzantine imperial edicts to destroy all religious art, thus sparing Rome from the wholesale destruction of early Christian art suffered in Constantinople.

The earliest painting dates to the middle of the 6th century. It’s known as a Maria Regina because it depicts the Virgin Mary enthroned, wearing a garment festooned with pearls in the style of a Byzantine empress. It’s thought to be the earliest surviving depiction of Mary as Queen of Heaven. It’s on a wall to the right of the apse, and probably was painted before the apse was even finished. On top of her are another six layers of frescoed plaster. Flaking and wear reveal fragments of each layer. This wall is known as the palimpsest wall because of the exposed superimposed layers. The website of the Archaeological Superintendency of Rome has a neato Flash applet illustrating the stratigraphy of the palimpsest.

Another notable work is the portraits of medical saints, painted during the early 8th century during the papacy of John VII. Historians believe people came to the chapel to be healed by the images of the saints, a tradition of the Eastern Church instituted in Rome during the Byzantine Papacy (537-752) when all the popes were selected by the Eastern Emperor. When the Roman papacy sought the patronage of Frankish King Pepin instead, Eastern customs fell out of favor. This is one of the only depictions of the medical saint tradition extant.

The frescoes in the chapel of Theodotus, named after a wealthy and prominent official at the court of Pope Zaccarias (r. 741-752) whose family is depicted in one of the paintings, are some of the best preserved. Sequences include the Crucifixion, the martyrdom of Quiricus (aka Cyricus) and Julietta, and the Virgin and Christ Child accompanied by Saints Peter, Paul, Julietta and Pope Zaccarias.

The church was abandoned in the 9th century after it was damaged by an earthquake and subsequent landslide in 847. In a classic historical paradox, the earthquake that wiped it off the map is probably what saved the frescoes from getting obliterated by war or new architectural fads. A new church, Santa Maria Liberatrice, was built on top of part of the old church in the 13th century. Santa Maria Liberatrice was rebuilt in Baroque style in 1600.

Santa Maria Antiqua was rediscovered again in 1701 by scavengers looking for building material in the Roman Forum. The apse was excavated and became a popular subject for artists and tourists to visit. They only got three months to enjoy the view, however, because the landowner decided to rebury it.

Urban legend has it that it was rediscovered yet again in 1900, when a monk fell into a sinkhole while digging in the vegetable garden. What we know for sure is that in 1900, as new excavations revealed more and more of the Roman Forum around it, the government decided to dispose of that pesky medieval/Baroque church in their way. Archaeologist Giacomo Boni took on the task of destroying history. The old church was so well built it took them two years to take it down. They had to use dynamite in the end, and no, there was no archaeological survey done on the site at any point during those two years.

Once fully excavated, Santa Maria Antiqua revealed more than 250 square meters (that’s 2690 square feet) of frescoes in brilliant color which of course immediately began to degrade courtesy of exposure to the elements. As excavations in the Forum continued, the church was used as a storage space for ancient artifacts. A wooden roof was built over the central nave in 1910 to try to stop the rapid deterioration.

It wasn’t enough. From 1912 until 1957, 12% of the frescoes were detached from the wall, transferred to new supports and kept in the Forum museum. In 1980 the church was closed permanently to the public and conservation work began in situ this time. In 2001, a program of thorough documentation and restoration was begun with funding and collaboration from the World Monuments Fund, among others, and it’s this program that is finally coming to an end. Some of the detached panels have been returned to their original locations.

The portraits of saints, surrounded by images of date trees and improbable fringed curtains, will remain partly unrestored and noticeably eroded.

“It leaves space for imagination,” said Werner Matthias Schmid, a principal conservator for the project, while giving a recent tour of the damp and dimly lighted church. Glaring white patches where paint had peeled away have been toned down to a grayish color. “We diminished the distortions of the losses,” he said.

The conservators have methodically documented their decisions about every millimeter of the restoration, as they stabilized flaking paint and undid failing old repairs. […]

The conservators have found Latin and Greek inscriptions in the murals in addition to traces of ancient brush strokes. The saints’ eyes and pearl strands are formed from dots of white lime. “Up close they’re almost three-dimensional,” Mr. Schmid said.

And now my favorite part: the before and after pics.

12th c. Romanesque cloister found decorating a pool

June 14, 2012

Medieval, Treasures

Gerardo Boto, professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Girona in Catalonia, Spain, was leafing through the July-August issue of Architectural Digest France in 2010 when he was astonished to see what looked very much like a medieval Romanesque cloister bordering the swimming pool of a 22-hectare estate in Palamos on the Costa Brava in northeastern Spain. The estate, named Mas del Vent (“House of the Wind”), belongs to German pharmaceutical billionaire Curt Engelhorn, one of the world’s 50 richest people, but he doesn’t live there. The estate is available for rent, in fact, but despite that, the Engelhorns have been extremely reluctant to allow the pool area to be photographed. AD photographer Vincent Leroux had to beg for permission to take a picture of the dramatic gallery of arches under umbrella pines embracing the swimming pool.

Enticed by the large double-page picture, Boto attempted to secure Engelhorn’s permission to examine the structure in person, but he was repeatedly refused. Boto contacted Leroux and was able to examine his high resolution photographs in detail. He also used Google Earth to get fairly precise measurements of the gallery. His research confirmed his initial impression that the pool folly was a 12th century Romanesque cloister very similar in style to the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos, a Benedictine monastery in the northwestern region of Castilla y León that is famous for its elaborately carved and exquisitely preserved two-story cloister built sometime in the span from the last quarter of the 11th century through the second half of the 12th century.

Like the cloister at Silos and only two other medieval Spanish monasteries, the pool cloister is composed of double columns, each carved separately, crowned with single block capitals decorated with carvings of human figures, plants and animals both real (birds, lions, wild boars) and mythological (griffins, dragons, harpies), but no religious scenes whatsoever. Boto recognized the style of the Palamos capitals as derived from two primary approaches used at Silos, the First Workshop style from around 1100 and the Second Workshop from around 1165. There is no doubt in his mind that whoever carved the Palamos capitals was very familiar with the Silos forms.

This style is very rare in the history of the Spanish Romanesque style, so even if some of the Mas del Vent cloister was a reproduction, any authentic parts at all would be a major addition to the art historical record. Thus Boto continued to research the cloister and he hit the jackpot: in the municipal archives of Palamos, he discovered pictures of the arches being assembled at the estate in 1959. From those pictures he could assess the masonry piece by piece, the weight of the stone, the erosion from centuries of elements, the incised mounting marks characteristic of Romanesque stonemasonry.

In May of this year, Boto gave a presentation of the results of his research at the Fugitive Art conference hosted by the Romanesque and Gothic art preservation organization of the University of Barcelona. Engelhorn’s representatives continued to refuse experts access to the cloister, even though they allowed anyone who could afford to pay for it to suntan underneath the columns.

Then last Tuesday the newspaper El Pais published an article about the pool cloister and broke the story wide open. All of a sudden the government, which had showed zero interest when preservation organizations pestered them to look into the cloister last year, was sending experts to assess the authenticity of the gallery, and Engelhorn’s people finally allowed the press and Boto to look at the cloister in person.

The Engelhorn family claims to have a report of inauthenticity (for real) issued in 1967 by an expert from the Metropolitan Museum of Art who made the determination after looking at some pictures. The report has not been released, and it seems odd that for years they would allow photographs of the 18th century stone farmhouse and grounds to be taken, even posted online, only refusing access to the incredibly gorgeous pool, which is always a major selling point in any real estate transaction. Even the restorer they hired to assess the cloister’s condition in 2000 had to fight with them for half a day before they’d let him take the pictures he needed to do his job.

Anyway the veil is torn now. The estate management company released a statement saying that the cloister was purchased in Madrid by Hans Engelhorn, Curt’s grandfather, on July 23, 1958 for one million pesetas, big money back then but the equivalent of just 6,000 euros ($7500) today. It wasn’t originally built in Madrid, however. It was acquired by art dealer Ignacio Martínez Martínez in 1931 and brought to Madrid from parts unknown, which means this cloister has been dismantled and rebuilt at least twice in its long life.

There is also evidence on some blocks of exposure to high temperature for several days. The Ortiz family who lived on the Madrid property with the cloister from 1931 to 1958 says there was no fire during that time. According to Juan Manuel Ortiz (86), marauding militants threatened to burn it during the Spanish Civil War, but the women wept and pleaded for them to spare the cloister and it worked.

The final report of the Ministry of Culture will take some weeks to complete, but the government’s initial assessment is that the cloister is an authentic medieval structure with some modern elements, possibly from the reconstructions. Since the Engelhorns purchased it legally in 1958, even once it’s officially authenticated there’s no question of the government confiscating it or anything like that.

According to Catalan Cultural Heritage laws, the government can declare the cloister a Cultural Asset of National Interest or add it to the Catalan Cultural Heritage list. If it’s declared the former, there will be a number of prohibitions applied to keep it from being moved or sold or exported without government permission. That won’t be an issue since the Engelhorns have no interest in moving their medieval cloister. They will, however, be required to open it to the public. Their representative says they’ll comply with any such regulations.

Do you recognize the people in these Civil War pics?

June 13, 2012

Medieval, Museums

The Museum of the Confederacy headquartered in Richmond, Virginia needs your help. They have an extensive collection of Civil War artifacts, including many period pictures, but even though they have excellent provenance records from donors, some of the pictures were found on battlefields or left behind with civilians for safekeeping so the museum has no idea who they depict. For curators to attempt to research each picture and locate potential relatives would be prohibitively expensive.

The museum is therefore releasing eight pictures, mainly of women and children, to the public on the very remote chance that someone might just recognize their great-grandmother from old family albums. Perhaps crowdsourcing can step into the void.

“We don’t know who they are and the people who picked them up did not know who they were,” said Ann Drury Wellford, curator of 6,000 Civil War images at the Richmond museum that has the largest collection of artifacts of the Confederate states, civilian and military. “They evoke an utter and complete sentimentality.”

Museum officials can only speculate on the children and adults, including soldiers, shown in the photographs. But whether they were sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, or siblings the prospect of identifying each grows dimmer with the passage of time.

Typically they were found by another soldier and handed down through generations. Ultimately an attic would be cleared or a trunk would be emptied and the photo would be given to the museum. Some have been in the museum’s possession for 60 years or more.

Considering the circumstances behind the discovery of these photos, it’s amazing that the museum knows as much as they do know about them. Take this Ambrotype of a doll-like little girl, for instance:

Ambrotype of unidentified girl found between the bodies of a Confederate and Union soldier

This photograph was found by Confederate Private Thomas W. Timberlake of the 2nd Virginia Infantry on the battlefield at Port Republic, Virginia in 1862. It was wedged between two dead bodies, one of a Confederate soldier and one of a Union soldier. Private Timberlake couldn’t tell which soldier the picture had belonged to, so he kept it. His descendants donated the photograph to the museum and told the battlefield tale that had come down to them through the generations.

We know the picture of this little girl belonged to a Union soldier:

It was found by Confederate Private Heartwell Kincaid Adams of the 3rd Virginia Cavalry in the haversack of a Union soldier who died in the Battle of High Bridge, Virginia on April 6th or 7th, 1865. Lee would surrender at Appomattox on April 9th.

You can see all eight of the pictures on the museum website here, and higher resolution ones on the MSNBC photoblog. If by some incredible twist of fate you recognize anyone, please email the Museum, call 855-649-1861 x113, or drop them a line on Twitter or Facebook.

Rare remains of soldier found at Waterloo

June 12, 2012

Modern(ish)

Last Friday, June 8th, Belgian archaeologists unearthed the skeletal remains of a soldier killed during the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815. Buried under just 15 inches of soil, the position of the skeleton suggests the young man died where he fell and was hastily covered with a thin layer of dirt, probably by his comrades. This is a very rare find. The victorious armies cleared the battlefield of their dead, and the defeated French were eventually buried on site in mass graves. It’s the first time in a century that a body from the Napoleonic wars has been found on a Belgian battlefield, and this one is almost entirely undisturbed.

Waterloo was part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815, which is why there is a man-made conical hill called the Lion Mound memorializing the spot where the Prince of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne, was hit in the shoulder by a musket ball during the Battle of Waterloo. The soldier’s body was discovered in the shadow of the Lion Mound.

Unfortunately his skull was destroyed by mechanical diggers prepping the area for the upcoming demolition and re-construction of the visitor’s center, shops, hotels and parking lots. The Ministry of Archaeology for the region of Walloon Brabant took over and excavated the rest of the skeleton, finding it almost complete. Only the skull, one foot and some hand bones are missing.

The body was spared any Thénardier-style looting. Coins were found in his pocket, one of them a half franc from 1811, the others too corroded to identify immediately. Experts are cleaning them now. He was also carrying a flint and a small red sphere in his right pocket. Next to his body were discovered a spoon and an unidentified wooden object, possibly a rifle butt, with the initials “C.B.” carved into it.

His uniform has rotted away but his leather epaulets survived. Archaeologists are hoping they will be able to identify the soldier’s regiment from the epaulets, and possibly from the spoon if it’s army-issue. If they can discover his regiment, they’ll probably be able to find his name on the combatant records. The initial analysis of the bones indicates that he was around 20 years old, 5’1″ tall and had abrasion grooves on his molars from tearing opening gunpowder tubules with his teeth.

One particularly poignant artifact was a musket ball found inside the soldier’s ribcage. This is probably the smoking gun, as it were: he took a bullet to the chest, then either retreated or was carried by comrades 100 yards or so behind the front line. The location of his burial was 100 meters (109 yards) behind the British front line, close to the Duke of Wellington’s army infirmary. It’s highly unlikely that a French soldier would have fallen in this position. Although we don’t know for sure yet, the soldier was probably British.

The British cleared the field of their dead after their victory, burying them in consecrated ground. This fellow could have been overlooked because he was buried, albeit shallowly, where he died. The French dead, in contrast, remained unburied for days, their bodies robbed by locals, until they were put in mass graves and burned with quicklime. Any skeletal remains still recoverable from the mass graves were removed in subsequent decades for the grotesque practice of fertilizer production.

There is some footage of the skeleton being examined in the lab and of the battlefield in this BBC News video.

New terracotta warriors, horses, accessories found

June 11, 2012

Ancient, Museums, Treasures

A three-year excavation of Pit One in the mausoleum complex of Qin Shi Huang (259 B.C.–210 B.C.), the first emperor of a unified China, has uncovered more than 100 new terracotta warriors, 12 horses, two chariots and hundreds of accessories, including war drums and the first shield of its kind ever found in the four main pits of the complex. This is the third excavation since the first warriors were discovered by farmers digging a well outside the city of Xi’an, Shaanxi province, central China in 1974, and most of the estimated 8000-strong army is still buried.

The shield is an impressive 28 inches high and 20 inches wide and decorated with red, green and white geometric patterns. Discovered on the right of one of the chariots, the shield probably belonged to an official of high rank. A bronze shield and chariot were found during the 1980 excavation, but the bronzes are half the size of the terracotta warriors. Archaeologists think the newly discovered shield is life-sized, an accurate depiction of Qin Dynasty (221 B.C.-206 B.C.) shields.

The 100+ newly-discovered figures contain great rarities and new information as well. Eight of them are officials, identifiable as such from their more elaborate, more delicately patterned armor. Much more of the original paint has survived on these new warriors than on any previously discovered. Every figure in the massive army was initially painted with raw lacquer, a technique that doesn’t stand the test of time very well. The lacquer pulls away from the terracotta surface, flaking off and fading. Some of the warriors were put under even more stress by water and fire during the millennia. Most of the figures that still had color attached when they were unearthed in the 1970s quickly shed it once they were exposed to the air.

The colors are far better preserved this time, still brilliant in hue and showing the amazing detail work artisans did to make every figure have its own distinctive look. They have different colored eyes and different flesh tones, and one of the heads even has delicate little eyelashes still clearly visible.

Broken warrior with extensive surviving paint

Pit 9901, a smaller site in the southeast area of the tomb complex that archaeologists only started excavating last August, has produced a fascinating set of 20 figures that appear to be non-military, likely performers intended to keep the emperor entertained in the afterworld. They aren’t wearing armor and they strike curious poses: one holds his left arm with his right hand, one is crouched. They stand face to face, portly figures looking south and slender figures looking north.

One of the Pit 9901 pieces stands literally head and shoulders above the others. He was found missing his head, but his remaining body from neck to toe is 7’3″ tall. His feet alone are over 12″ long. Assuming a proportional head, when complete this figure was 8’2″ tall.

Archaeologists have also discovered additional evidence that the figures were deliberately burned and broken in antiquity. The warriors were found in pieces, some of them with their clay melted and misshapen. There is charcoal residue and white ash in some of the pits, signs of a high temperature fire deliberately set using organic materials like wood and hemp ropes. That puts the dates of the fires close to the time of burial because if they had been set by looters centuries later, the organic kindling would have been too decayed to turn to charcoal. The fires do not appear to have been set as part of a burial ritual because only a few of the pits were burned.

The primary arson suspect is Xiang Yu, a general who along with other ambitious war leaders and would-be kinglets rebelled against Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s son Qin Er Shi in 209 B.C. Xiang Yu was reputed to have been particularly ruthless, slaughtering entire cities even after they surrendered to him and burning down every palace he encountered. He defeated the Qin army in 207 B.C., burying them all alive after they surrendered. According to several ancient Chinese historians, after his victory Xiang Yu looted and burned Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum. He wasn’t kind to his allies either, setting them up for assassination and backstabbing them regularly.

On the pro side, he did give himself a pretty awesome title, Hegemon-King of Western Chu, and according to ancient historian Sima Qian (ca. 135 B.C.–86 B.C.) he composed a song lamenting his impending defeat at the Battle of Gaixia in 202 B.C. He also apparently had a double pupil in one eye which was part of his mystique as a king and sage. Last but certainly not least, he makes an appearance in War Stories, one of the greatest Firefly episodes, in which Xiang Yu’s writings on torture are a recurring theme raised by both Shepherd Book and the crime boss/torturer Niska.