July 2012 – Page 5 – The History Blog

700 rare, pristine baseball cards found in Ohio attic

July 11, 2012

A collection of 700 rare baseball cards from a 1910 promotional series has been discovered in pristine condition in an attic in Defiance, Ohio. Restaurant owner Karl Kissner and his cousin Karla were going through their late grandfather’s attic when they came across a green cardboard box underneath a crumbling wood dollhouse. The box that had once held women’s clothing was now covered in soot. Karla opened it and saw hundreds of small baseball cards tied with twine. Some of the names — Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Honus Wagner — were immediately recognizable, but not knowing whether these particular cards were authentic or of any value, the cousins set the box aside and continued to explore the attic.

Karl researched the cards and discovered there was a chance they might be valuable. He sent eight of them to Peter Calderon at Heritage Auctions in Dallas to determine whether they were authentic; the rest he locked up in a bank vault. Calderon confirmed that they were authentic 1910 E98 series baseball cards, a set so rare few people even know about them, and that they were in exceptionally good condition. The few 1910 E98 cards that have survived are faded, stained and worn, handled roughly by the sticky fingers of pre-World War I children. Most of the Kissner cards look like they’ve never been touched at all.

Heritage Auctions checked the context — the age of the house, how Karl’s grandfather Carl Hench might have acquired 700 1910 E98 cards — and all the pieces seemed to fit. Carl Hench was a butcher who ran a meat market in Defiance. The cards were promotional items distributed with caramels — one of the mysteries of the set is exactly which company manufactured them — so Hench probably sold the caramels in his shop, keeping some of the cards and giving away others. The family suspects he put the box of cards in the attic and forgot about it.

He died in 1944. After his wife died in 1976, the house was left to their daughter Jean Hench, Karl Kissner’s aunt. She was a pack rat, bless her heart, and never threw anything away. She died last October, leaving her possessions to 20 family members, including Karl and Karla. The family spent months looking through the house, finding all kinds of wonderful treasures like dresses from the turn of the century, a steamer trunk from Germany, and calendars from Carl Hench’s meat market. They finally got to the attic in February. Karla opened that fateful box on Leap Day.

Once the probable history of the cards was pieced together, Heritage Auctions sent them to Professional Sports Authenticator to confirm the authentication and to adjudicate condition. They authenticated the cards and judged them the finest E98 series they have ever seen. The Honus Wagner (he’s called “Hans” on this series) card is a perfect 10 in condition, the first 10 ever given an E98 series card. The highest grade an E98 Ty Cobb card has gotten before this was a seven. PSA graded 16 of the Ty Cobbs in this collection a nine.

The 20 members of the family mentioned in Aunt Jean’s will split the cards up. Some of them want to keep their cards; most of them want to sell them. The 37 star cards will be auctioned at Baltimore’s Camden Yards baseball field during the National Sports Collectors Convention on August 2nd. Heritage Auctions is taking bids on a set of 27 on their website and the current bid is already at $120,000 20 days before the auction. The rest of the cards will be spread out for individual sale so they don’t flood the market and lower the value. Experts think the whole collection could prove to be worth as much as $3 million.

The 100 Caravaggios controversy

July 10, 2012

Renaissance

Last week, a huge story broke: art historians had discovered 100 previously unknown drawings by Michelangelo Merisi, aka Caravaggio, from his student days in Milan. Since there are only 90 surviving paintings by the master of chiaroscuro, this collection would more than double the Caravaggio catalog and would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Art historians Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli spent two years going through 1,378 paintings and drawings from the workshop of Simone Peterzano, a late mannerist who had been a student of Titian’s in Venice and was Caravaggio’s teacher in Milan from 1584 to 1588. The collection is kept in Milan’s Castello Sforzesco, not on public display but open to scholars.

By comparing the drawings from the Peterzano collection to later works by Caravaggio, Curuz and Fedrigolli claim to have developed “a rigorous survey methodology for identifying underlying geometric patterns from the artist’s early Roman period” which allowed them to pick out his student work from the workshop group. The final tally was 100 drawings, 10 oil paintings and a letter to Peterzano that “highlights the friction and misunderstandings between two temperaments at odds” written in a “swift and violent style” that a handwriting expert claims is likely in Caravaggio’s hand.

Instead of submitting their groundbreaking conclusions to scholarly peer review, however, the researchers decided to publish their findings in two e-books translated into four languages, available for sale on Amazon.com and via links on their own website (netiquette warning: there’s an autoplay video on the homepage) for $17.36 a pop. The exceptional announcement coupled with e-book sales did not go over well in the art historical community, to put it mildly.

Tomaso Montanari, a professor of Baroque art at the University of Naples, said: “They didn’t pass through a scientific peer review, and that gives them little credibility. The Web site that claims that this is a great discovery reminds me of TV sales promotions. From the scholarly point of view, it really has no value.”

Even the city of Milan, which owns the Castello Sforzesco and the Peterzano collection within, was reluctant to jump on board the Caravaggio train. A city council spokesperson noted that those drawings have been browsed by plenty of experts before and nobody has ever attributed any of them to Caravaggio. City council member Stefano Boeri sounded similar notes of caution, insisting that the new attributions be carefully examined by a panel of experts before anyone sounds the “100 new Caravaggios found!” publicity trumpet. He is also launching an investigation into “the correctness of the procedures regarding the publication” of the e-books.

Curuz’s response to the question of why they went straight to e-books instead of seeking out scholarly review is the classic insider conspiracy trope, so often seen in medical and scientific quackery.

Mr. Bernardelli Curuz, who is the artistic director of the Fondazione Brescia Musei, which manages monuments and organizes art exhibitions in the northern city of Brescia, said that they had opted to make their discovery known through an e-book because academic research in Italy was in the hands of an established, tight-knit group that tried to thwart younger scholars. The book was published in four languages “because we wanted to reach the most scholars possible,” he said, denying any underlying commercial interests.

Protip: if you want to reach the most scholars possible instead of looking like you’re just out to make a buck, make your research available for less than $34.72, maybe even for free.

This is not to say that they’re entirely wrong about the attribution. Several of the drawings do bear some resemblance to Caravaggio’s later work, but most of them are really rough sketches, body parts and the like. Even the portraits that when reoriented and resized look like they fit into one of his oil paintings are pretty raw work when you look at the drawings on their own terms in decent resolution. For example, here’s one of the composites in the e-book:

That’s a detail from Caravaggio’s The Conversion of Saul with an inset of one of the drawings from the Peterzano collection. Here are the complete painting and the drawing side by side:

"The Conversion of Saul" by Caravaggio, ca. 1600

Old man drawing in Peterzano collection, attributed to Caravaggio

The resemblance is unimpressive seen in full, isn’t it? The drawing is fairly rudimentary and although it may be a function of the scan, it looks to me like the composite made generous use of the contrast tool in Photoshop to give it more of that chiaroscuro depth that is so characteristic of Caravaggio’s famous work.

The fact is, attribution is a tricky thing and if style matching is your only evidence, then you don’t have much evidence at all. They’ve gone about this in a highly shady way and their claims have been far more definite than is prudent, or even decent, really. On Tuesday Amazon removed the e-books from their offerings — they won’t say why — but they are still available on self-publishing site Lulu (Young Caravaggio – One hundred rediscovered works – Volume I, Volume II).

The city of Milan has made all of the drawings in question available for download in six zip files on their website free of charge, naturally. The drawings and catalog information will be consolidated in a website that will go live July 12th so bookmark http://graficheincomune.comune.milano.it/ now and check it tomorrow.

The return of Coventry’s medieval stained glass

July 9, 2012

Medieval, Modern(ish)

The West Midlands city of Coventry was a prosperous town during the Middle Ages, a major center of the textile trade, and by the 14th century the fourth largest city in England. It had two churches, the 12th century cathedral in St. Mary’s Priory, which was destroyed in Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, and St. Michael’s, a 14th century Gothic church that was the largest parish church in the country. The guilds saw to it that St. Michael’s was packed with top quality stained glass by artists like John Thornton, the master glazier who created York Minster’s Great East Window.

After St. Mary’s was demolished — the only cathedral to suffer this fate during the Reformation — Coventry was absorbed into the nearby Lichfield diocese. In 1918, the new diocese of Coventry was created and since the city already had a large, dramatic church in St. Michael’s, it became the new Coventry Cathedral.

Just over 20 years later, in 1939, with World War II looming on the horizon, the stained glass panels were removed from the cathedral windows as a precaution to prevent their destruction in any German bombing raids. Coventry was replete with industrial targets both civil and military, so there was little doubt that it would see action. The glass was packed into 30 crates and stored in the cellar of the rectory in the small village of Hampton Lucy.

Coventry was bombed a number of times in the early days of the war, but the targets were primarily military and industrial. The damage to the historic center and loss of life were small. On the evening of November 14, 1940, German bombers dropped high explosive bombs on the city’s utilities and roads. Once the water was knocked out and the roads were impassable from bomb craters, the next wave of German planes dropped explosive and incendiary bombs with the express purpose of starting fires that fire brigades could not contain thanks to the damaged water mains and cratered roads.

Coventry Cathedral suffered multiple direct hits. Firefighters were able to put out the first fire of the evening, but as the bombing progressed that night, the fires became impossible to contain. By the time the all-clear sirens rang the next morning, there was nothing left of Coventry Cathedral but smoldering ruins. A few walls and the tall spire were all that remained. Those ruins are still on the spot. A new cathedral was built in Modernist style right next to it, with the ruins as a consecrated garden space dedicated to peace and reflection. The foundation stone was laid by Queen Elizabeth II in 1956 and the new church was consecrated in 1962.

Meanwhile, in 1957 the little rectory in Hampton Lucy was sold. The crates full of medieval stained glass had remained unharmed in the cellar for almost 20 years, but with the sale they were returned to Coventry. The architect of the new cathedral, Sir Basil Spence, wanted to incorporate some of this glass into the new building in some way. Putting together whole windows wasn’t going to happen because most of the panes had been removed and crated without any annotation of their original arrangement. Instead, Spence and his team selected a few choice pieces and in 1965 installed them in a small chapel in the south porch of the old cathedral ruins known today as Haigh Chapel.

Since then, other panes have been integrated into the new cathedral, including mosaic-style combinations that had been put together during 19th century modifications to the church. Around 5,000 pieces of stained glass were still in storage.

Thanks to a joint fundraising project by World Monuments Fund Britain and Coventry Cathedral that raised £250,000 ($388,000), conservators will begin work on the medieval stained glass of Coventry Cathedral this summer, and best of all, they’ll be doing it in public. The Faces in the Glass Live exhibit at Herbert Art Gallery & Museum will run from August 6th through October 31st. Admission is free, and visitors will be able to watch the conservators as they clean the panes, meet them, and interact with them. Every Thursday at 3:00 conservators will give a 30 minute talk about the glass and their work.

The stored glass is currently catalogued by color and subject, but there is hope that they might be recomposed into their original medieval configurations thanks to a piece of software originally designed to piece together shredded Cold War documents.

Ian Crick-Smith, a researcher at the University of Lincoln, says that renderings of the broken edges of the glass will be created using two- or three-dimensional laser scanning, and that software will then be used to suggest best matches and alignment. “There is definitely a growth area for digital technology in the heritage investigation sector,” he says. Similar technology was used by Princeton University to help reconstruct fragments from ancient frescoes at Akrotiri.

The software was developed after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when it was used to recreate documents that had been destroyed by shredding and tearing. “It has also been used to reassemble damaged works of art on paper,” Crick-Smith says. “We don’t know of any other instance where this has been used for stained glass.” The composition of the glass and Thornton’s production system are also being explored.

The ultimate plan is to create a display area for a selection of the pieces in the crypts underneath the ruins of the old cathedral. Other panes might be used to make contemporary art installations in the new cathedral.

For more on the history of the stained glass windows of Coventry Cathedral, read this excellent article. To explore the ruins and the new cathedral, see these QuickTime panoramas.

New De Soto site found in Florida

July 8, 2012

Renaissance, Treasures

Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto was the first European to explore deep inland within what would become the United States. For three years (1539-1542), his search for (non-existent) gold and a (non-existent) passage to China drove him and his men to cut a violent, disease-ridden swath through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas.

Very little in the way of archaeology has been found marking his route. What we know of it has mainly been pieced together with difficulty from his journals and from tribal oral histories, all of which use references to features of a landscape long gone. The only confirmed site is in Tallahassee, Florida, where they wintered the first year. Any discovery of material remains left behind by the expedition, therefore, is of major historical significance.

Archaeologist Ashley White has found strong evidence on his own family property that De Soto’s team stopped there in the summer of 1539 when it was an Indian town called Potano near present-day Orange Lake in north Marion County, Florida. White had explored the 700-acre property before looking for the remains of a 17th century Spanish cattle ranch he thought might have been there, but all he found were relatively common Indian artifacts.

It was Florida weather that ultimately showed him the way. Heavy rainfall in 2005 flooded the land. When it drained away, it took hardened sand with it, leaving once-buried artifacts totally exposed on the surface. On the west bank of an old creek, Dr. White found a copper coin from the late 1400s. East of the creek bed, White, his bioarchaeologist wife Michele and their son Ethan found even more coins — ultimately they recovered 100 cooper coins minted in Spain between 1556 and 1621 — plus Murano glass trade beads, Spanish blue on white porcelain and postholes.

During the first two years of excavations, White’s working hypothesis was that they had discovered the remains of that early Spanish cattle ranch. When he examined the artifacts and the architecture of the building remains in detail, however, he realized they were very similar in style to what you see in Spanish missions built along Indian trails in Florida. The missionaries used De Soto’s journals and maps to determine where the potential converts were located.

Returning to the other side of the creek where he had found the 15th century Spanish coin, White found another two from around the same period. The three copper coins were two Ferdinand and Isabellas (1497-1504) and one Enrique IV (1471-74), at least half a century older than the ones at the mission site. He also found seven beautiful cobalt blue Nueva Cadiz beads from around 1520, probably originally arranged into a crucifix, and more Venetian glass trade beads, these ones older and more elaborate than the ones on the east side of the creek. The facets, multi-layered coloring and chevron patterns of the Murano beads are identical to other beads found at the known De Soto site in Tallahassee and the suspected De Soto site found three years ago in Georgia.

Then White found a few links of iron chain mail from Spain, with designs De Soto’s men would have woven onto their garments to protect them from Indian spears and arrows. The way the chain mail was linked predated the mission.

He also unearthed a pig jaw, unique to the domesticated herd of European animals De Soto brought to help feed his men.

There had been other Spanish explorers, such as Panfilo de Narvaez, but they had not brought Old World pigs, nor had they traveled as far inland.

Experts have analyzed the finds and so far all the results confirm they were left by the De Soto expedition. A numismatics curator at Princeton confirmed that the three coins were of the age and type used to pay De Soto’s troops and workers. The chevron beads were sent to Italy to confirm they were of 16th century Murano origin. Radiocarbon dating found the Sus scrofa, a long-legged black Spanish domestic pig, to whom the jawbone was once attached was slaughtered in 1539. Several museums compared the chain mail to Spanish pieces in their collections and found it was manufactured in Spain between 1490 and the 1530s. X-ray fluorescence testing confirmed that the iron in the mail dates to the 15th century.

According to Jerald Milanich, an expert in De Soto’s expedition who has written multiple books on the subject and who is the archaeology curator emeritus at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History, “there is absolutely no doubt that is a De Soto contact site,” and he is “99.99 percent sure this is the town of Potano, the major Indian town.” De Soto sought out Native American settlements in his eternal search for food and in the hope that they could tell him where all the (non-existent) gold was. He would have traded the glass pieces in exchange for food, but also occupied the town with his army to plunder their food stores and infect them with measles and smallpox while he was at it.

Eventually he moved on, going north to Tallahassee, doubtless to the great relief of the Potano Indians. In 1542, Hernando De Soto died of a fever on the banks of the Mississippi and was buried in secret, possibly in the Mighty Mississip’ itself, by his comrades who wanted to keep the locals thinking that he was the incarnation of the sun god instead of a puny human. Sixty-four years later, the Spanish returned to the Potano where they built the Mission San Buenaventura de Potano by the creek just east of De Soto’s old encampment.

The Ocala Star-Banner has the most in depth coverage of this discovery, including an excellent photo gallery. Keep an eye on their Discovery De Soto page for more news as it develops.

Karachi police bust truckful of Buddhist antiquities

July 7, 2012

Ancient, Looting, Social policy

Acting on a tip from intelligence agencies, early on Friday Karachi police intercepted a truck carrying a 20-foot container full of ancient Buddhist artifacts hidden under brooms, slippers, furniture and bales of straw. There were 300 artifacts in the back of that truck, include massive statues that required specialized heavy machinery to unload.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phuFLAuPzcg&w=430]

Most of the artifacts date to around the third century and come from the kingdom of Gandhara, an ancient Vedic and later Buddhist civilization in the Peshawar valley that stretched from northern Pakistan to the Kabul River in eastern Afghanistan. The statues mostly depict enlightened beings, like an ornamented, mustachioed Bodhisattva that weighs 2,200 pounds and a Jataka (a birth story of the Buddha) tablet that shows Queen Maya giving birth to Prince Siddhartha while spirits celebrate around her. Another important statue depicts the goddess Hariti with two of her children, who in Gandharan tradition was once a baby-devouring demon but who was taught a stern lesson when the Buddha kidnapped one of her hundreds of children. She converted to Buddhism and become a loving mother goddess.

Truck driver Zafar Ali and another man traveling with him were arrested. Ali claimed they were headed to Rawalpindi, but a delivery order found after a search of his belongings said the cargo was to be transported to Sialkot City. He fingered his boss, Asif Butt, who told the authorities that the truck was loaded in the middle of the night with innocuous broom sticks and shoes from three legitimate businesses, but then a fourth person asked them to load five big and eight small boxes and bring them to Sialkot. Butt of course denies knowing what was in those boxes, one of which, let’s not forget, weighed more than 2,000 pounds, but he’s more than willing to snitch out the man who gave them the boxes.

Police suspected most of the artifacts were stolen from museums, primarily the Swat Museum which is known for its large collection of Buddhist artifacts from the Gandhara era, but after examining the antiquities Qasim Ali Qasim, the director of the Sindh province archaeology and museums department, told the police they were more likely to have been looted from archaeological sites in Swat, which is currently mired in military anti-Islamist operations. Looters have been taking full advantage of the distracted authorities to help themselves to the rich history of Buddhist and Hindu art in the area. Qasim thinks the objects were looted individually and moved to Karachi in small shipments. Once they had a large group, they planned to truck them out of Karachi and out of Pakistan with deep-pocketed European antiquities markets as the final destination.

The information retrieved from the suspects in yesterday’s bust has produced immediate results. A raid on a Karachi warehouse on Saturday uncovered two more boxes of Gandhara kingdom artifacts, including statues of the Buddha, bronze artifacts, pottery and decorative plaques. They’re investigating whether this is part of a larger smuggling ring (it is).