Month: February 2013

USS Monitor sailors to buried at Arlington

Modern(ish), Museums

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced last week that the remains of two sailors recovered from the wreck of the USS Monitor, the Civil War ironclad warship that was on the Union side in the first battle of ironclads in history, will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on March 8th, the 151st anniversary of the famous battle. Navy and U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) representatives will pick up the remains from the military’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) in Hawaii and escort them to Virginia on March 7th. The next day’s burial ceremony with full military honors will take place at 4:00 PM. A horse-drawn caisson, a two-wheeled carriage used during the Civil War to carry artillery ammunition, will bear the caskets to their graves.

“These may very well be the last Navy personnel from the Civil War to be buried at Arlington,” said Mabus. “It’s important we honor these brave men and all they represent as we reflect upon the significant role Monitor and her crew had in setting the course for our modern Navy.”

The Monitor was the first ironclad warship made in the United States. It was a response to the news that the Confederacy had created a casemate ironclad over the hull of the former USS Merrimack, a steam-powered frigate that was docked at the Gosport Navy Yard in Virginia and had been half-assedly scuttled by Union forces as they evacuated after Virginia seceded. The Virginia and a flotilla of accompanying ships attempted to break the Union blockade by engaging the Union fleet at the Battle of Hampton Roads on March 8th, 1862. They were doing well, taking down several Union ships on the first day, but then they stopped on account of darkness. The second day the Monitor showed up and the two ironclads went head-to-head in an epic clash of iron titans.

They fought each other for three hours. The Virginia had 14 gun ports and fixed guns positioned in each, much like traditional wooden ships only with iron cladding. The entire ship had to be turned in order to fire. The Monitor, on the other hand, had the advantage of a revolutionary rotating gun turret that could hold two massive Dahlgren artillery guns and 14 men. There were no breaks to stop the turning, though, and the close quarters, muzzle-loading and heat of the guns meant that they couldn’t just rotate the turret and fire at will. They were able to get off one shot every five to eight minutes. Most of the shots were fired as the turret turned. Since these ships weren’t exactly fast movers, those strafing shots still made contact.

The final result was technically a draw. Both ships battered each other to a standstill and the Virginia withdrew. In strategic terms it was a win for the Union because they looked cool and because the blockade remained unbroken. The two ironclads met again on May 8th but did not engage, despite the Virginia‘s attempt to draw the Monitor out. Three days later, the Virginia was scuttled when Confederate forces withdrew from Norfolk.

On New Year’s Eve 1862, the Monitor sank in a storm off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. It was being towed by the USS Rhode Island at the time, but its iron cladding and top-heavy turret made it particularly susceptible to rough ocean waters. Most of the 62 crewmen were rescued by the Rhode Island, but 16 went down with the ship.

The wreck discovered on the Atlantic floor in August 1973. As attempts to raise the entire ship were deemed too likely to damage the wreck and too expensive, the site was named a National Marine Sanctuary and later a National Historic Landmark to protect it from treasure hunters and coastal traffic. Parts of it have been raised, however: the propeller in 1998, the steam engine in 2001 and on August 5, 2002, a team of Navy divers and NOAA experts, raised the 150-ton revolving gun turret.

During the 41 day lead-up to the recovery of the turret, divers found the remains of two sailors, one on top of the other, who had been trapped inside the turret when the ship capsized and sank. The turret was found inverted with the crewmen buried under coal, debris and two Dahlgren guns 13.5 feet long. Despite 140 years spent under water and the rough circumstances of their demise, the sailors’ skeletons were almost complete.

In the attempt to identify the crewmen, JPAC experts were able to extract DNA and discover a number of personal details. One was about 35 years of age and walked with a limp. He wore a gold ring and had a notch in his teeth indicating that he smoked a pipe. The other was about 21 years old and had broken his nose at some point. He wore mismatched shoes. JPAC was unable to pinpoint who the two men are, although the names of the 16 sailors who lost their lives aboard the Monitor are known and there are a number of pictures taken of the ship and crew. The DNA did not match any of the known descendants and family members of the Monitor crew.

Last year, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Hampton Roads, facial reconstructions made from the molds of the skulls were publicized in the hope that somebody might have some old family pictures that identified the men. It was a long shot, and unfortunately no information was discovered.

The three most likely candidates are Jacob Nicklis, Robert Williams and William Bryan. The reconstructed face of the older sailor does bear a resemblance to Williams, the 30-year-old Welsh-born first-class fireman of the Monitor, but they weren’t able to confirm the identification. In the picture at right left, Robert Williams is the strapping mustachioed fellow in the hat standing with his arms crossed on the right just behind the guys playing checkers.

JPAC will continue to try to identify the sailors, but it’s been more than a decade since they were recovered from the ocean floor and the Navy believes it’s time to bury their remains.

Artifacts from the wreck site will continue to be recovered. The wreck, like many other iron ships, has become unstable and is in danger of imminent collapse. The NOAA wants to make every effort to save belongings of the crew and any parts of the ship they can over the next few decades before they decay. Past and future artifacts recovered from the wreck are conserved and displayed at the USS Monitor Center at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, which also has a nifty full-sized replica of the Monitor outside the entrance which you can visit.

1540s Maiolica plate found hanging on cottage wall

Renaissance, Treasures

A woman in Somerset, England, discovered she had a rare Italian Renaissance Maiolica plate hanging on the wall of her cottage when she invited appraiser Richard Bromell of Charterhouse Auctioneers in Sherborne, Dorset, to assess some of the objects in her home for their market value. It was hanging in a makeshift wire frame behind a door that was always open. Only about two inches of it were visible when Bromwell caught a glimpse of it.

At first he thought it had to be a 19th century reproduction worth perhaps £2,000 ($3,100), but when he took it to experts at the Ashmolean Museum they confirmed that it was the real thing: a Maiolica charger made in Urbino around 1540. The owner had inherited it from a relative years ago and had no idea of its age or value. It was put up for auction at Charterhouse on February 14th with a pre-sale estimate of £100,000 ($155,000), but due to massive interest from bidders all over Europe and the US, the final hammer price was an astonishing £567,000 ($880,000).

It’s the condition and quality of the painting that made the market salivate. The dish is nearly 500 years old, but the colors are still brilliant and the finish glossy. The only damage was a repaired chip about 1.4 inches wide on the bottom of the charger. It’s barely noticeable and doesn’t overlap with any of the figures, just with the yellow border and a green scribble of grass.

The plate is 16 inches in diameter and painted in a style called istoriato, an elaborate, highly detailed scene from history or legend. The subject on this piece is the Feast of Herod, although it takes a little looking to see it. Herod and his wife sit at a table under the columned portico in the left background. Walking up the steps towards them is Salome and some ladies carrying the head of John the Baptist on a platter. In the center background between the upper tree trunk on the left and the riverbank on the right is the executioner standing next to John’s headless body.

The rest of the scene is populated by wealthy revelers banqueting front and center, musicians to the left of them, ladies dancing to the left of the musicians, skinny dippers in the river on the right and a townscape in the back. It’s a big ol’ Renaissance party that could be set in any hilly town in Europe. One extra special touch is a hint of what may be the painter’s name hidden in the fur stole of the woman sitting on the right side of the central foreground banqueting table.

The design is a version of The Feast of Herod, a woodcut by German printmaker Sebald Beham dating to 1525-1545. The maiolica version leaves out the figure of death of holding a scythe who follows a couple walking just beneath Salome and John’s head. The architecture and overall scene is compressed to fit onto a plate, but other than those changes and the marvelous addition of color, it’s a faithful rendition.

No wonder that it claimed one of the highest prices ever paid for Italian pottery. The lucky buyer was London jewelery dealer S.J. Phillips Ltd. Company director Francis Norton said: “The plate is in wonderful condition and we really fancied it and were determined to get it. We don’t know what we’ll do with it yet but we might put it on display.”

Vermeer’s Woman in Blue at the Getty

Modern(ish), Museums

Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece Woman in Blue Reading a Letter that was restored to its original beauty before going on a tour of Asia last year has touched down in the United States. From February 16th to March 31st, it will be on display at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, its only stop in North America before it returns to the Rijksmuseum in time for the museum’s grand reopening on April 13th.

“This truly represents an extraordinary opportunity for Southern California,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Vermeer’s Woman in Blue is one of his greatest and most famous masterpieces. It has very rarely traveled outside of Amsterdam and this is the painting’s first visit to the West Coast. Vermeer’s paintings of women reading letters and engaged in other private, domestic activities have a unique intimacy and reality to them that can only be fully appreciated in the flesh. His finest works, like the Woman in Blue, have a magical immediacy that has never been rivaled.”

Taking advantage of the rare presence of such a great example of an interior subject from the Dutch Golden Age, the museum is exhibiting a number of other pieces along with the Vermeer which focus on people engaged in private moments inside the home. Works from the Getty’s permanent collection include Gerard ter Borch’s Music Lesson, Jan Steen’s Drawing Lesson, Pieter de Hooch’s Woman Preparing Bread and Butter for a Boy, and Frans van Mieris’s The Doctor’s Visit. An additional piece, An Elegant Lady Writing at Her Desk with a Dog beside Her, has been loaned for the exhibition from a private collection in New York. I love the geometry in Hooch’s painting and I can’t help but wonder what the doctor is peering at in his balloon flask in the Mieris work.

This is a great time to be on the West Coast if you’re a fan of Vermeer and other Dutch masters. The de Young Museum in San Francisco is currently hosting what is probably Vermeer’s most famous work, Girl with a Pearl Earring, as part of an exhibition of 35 important paintings from the Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis in The Hague. Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis features 35 important works by Dutch Golden Age masters like Vermeer, Rembrandt and Jan Steen. A companion exhibit at the de Young, Rembrandt’s Century, will be centered on Rembrandt’s etchings and those of other artists who preceded and followed him.

Girl and friends will travel to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta next, where they will be on exhibit from June 22, 2013 to September 29, 2013. The last stop before they return to the Netherlands will be Frick Collection in New York City. You can catch them there from October 22, 2013 to January 12, 2014.

Again we have a major renovation to thank for this artistic bounty. The Mauritshuis is also closed right now while the space is being renovated and expanded. It will remain closed until mid-2014 after which it will have a grand reopening of its own.

The last Medici, savior of Florence’s art, exhumed

Modern(ish)

Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, only daughter of Cosimo III de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and wife of Johann Wilhelm II, Elector Palatine, died on February 18th, 1743, at the age of 75. Historical accounts describe it variously as a long, painful death, a sudden fever or an “oppression on the breast.” The culprit was long thought to have been the syphilis her husband infected her with shortly after their marriage, a disease which was also said to be the cause of their childlessness. Another possible candidate was breast cancer.

Last October, the Electress Palatine was exhumed from her crypt in the Basilica of San Lorenzo as part of a collaborative research project by the University of Florence and the Reiss Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, Germany. A tent was raised around her bones which remained in situ for a week while researchers took pictures and made a 3D scan of the skeleton. Two medallions were removed from the coffin for restoration and a sample of bone was taken for further laboratory analysis. The body was then reinterred. Because we live in an amazing era, the scans allowed the researchers to create an exact replica of the skeleton, including the crown she was still wearing, using a 3D printer.

The bone sample and material recovered from a pot found in the coffin which is believed to have contained her entrails in keeping with a traditional Medici burial practice, are being DNA tested by biological anthropologist Albert Zink of the European Academy of Bolzano, who also worked on the team who sequenced the genome of Otzi the Iceman.

Anna Maria Luisa’s skeleton “does not indicate late-stage syphilis, which is characterized by skull remodelling and bone outgrowth”, says Zink. But, he adds, it does not rule out earlier stages of the disease, which can in some cases result in organ failure and death.

Anna Maria’s husband died in 1716 when he was 58 and she was 48. Any syphilis she may have contracted from him would have been very far advanced indeed by the time of her death.

“Full DNA-sequence information may allow us to identify any susceptibility genes for breast cancer,” [Zink] says, “but we don’t yet know if the sample is of sufficient quality for this since the tomb environment had been very damp.”

It’s not surprising that the tomb would be damp given that the 1966 flood of the Arno River that drenched Florence in as much as 22 feet of mud and water also swamped the Medici tombs in San Lorenzo. It is surprising that despite the flood, the Electress’ skeleton was found mainly intact and articulated.

Scientists were also surprised to find that Anna Maria was buried with the crown of the Palatinate, not one of the Medici crowns. It’s a testament to the connection she felt to her title, which she used consistently until her death, and to her long-deceased husband. They reputedly had an amicable relationship, STDs or no STDs, and shared a passion for art and culture that made the court of the Palatinate a magnet for musicians, painters, architects.

That passion for art led Anna Maria to the act that would define her legacy and that of her illustrious family in the city they had ruled for 300 years. As the last of the Medici, it was up to her to save the cultural patrimony of the city which was in mortal danger of dispersal.

The question of the succession of the Grand Duchy had been her father Cosimo III’s obsession for years before his death in 1723. Anna Maria’s eldest brother Ferdinando died childless of syphilis in 1713. The youngest brother Gian Gastone hated his wife, generally preferred the company of his male favorites, and was unlikely to produce an heir. Seeing the writing on the wall, Cosimo was frantic to find a way to keep the Grand Duchy in Medici hands. It was technically a fiefdom of the Holy Roman Empire and Joseph I was keen to take control of it. To no avail, Cosimo tried to force Gian Gastone to get back together with his detested wife and impregnate her. By 1709, Cosimo was so desperate he made his brother Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici renounce his vows and marry Eleanor of Gonzaga. Francesco Maria died childless in 1711.

He then tried to reinstate the Republic of Tuscany which had died with the creation of the Grand Duchy in 1533. He actually got the Holy Roman Emperor to agree to the plan, but then he torpedoed the agreement by changing the terms so that Anna Maria would inherit the Grand Duchy first and the Republic reinstated only after her death. Charles VI was Holy Roman Emperor by this time, and when Cosimo promulgated a decree through the Tuscan senate that the Electress would inherit should Gian Gastone pre-decease her, Charles was furious. He felt that Cosimo was trying to abrogate his rights to determine succession.

Cosimo was no longer given a say in the fate of the Grand Duchy after that. He tried to get the European powers to acknowledge Anna Maria as heir, but he failed. In the end, they determined that if Gian Gastone died childless, the Grand Duchy would go directly to the Austrian House of Lorraine. Anna Maria was out.

She was not going to be ignored, however. She was still the heir to her younger brother’s allodial title, meaning all the property owned by the family independent of the fiefdom of the Grand Duchy. When Gian Gastone died of a variety of diseases in July 1737, Anna Maria inherited a bunch of cash, the Duchy of Urbino, the family regalia, the contents of many palaces and one of the greatest collections of art ever known to man. The Lorrainers immediately made it clear that they had zero respect for the Medici patrimony except insofar as it could be converted to ready cash. They auctioned off furniture from Medici palaces in the Palazzo Vecchio, melted down silver objects from the Pitti Palace for coin and threatened Anna Maria with physical harm if she didn’t turn over her internationally famous jewelry collection so they could sell the stones.

Under this kind of pressure from the avaricious House of Lorraine, within a month of her brother’s death the formidable Anna Maria already had a draft drawn up of what would become known as the Family Pact. By the terms of this contract, the Medici possessions including “all furniture, effects and rarities” including “galleries, paintings, statues, libraries, jewels and other precious things such as holy relics” would be bequeathed to the new Grand Duke, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, husband of Maria Teresa of Austria and father of Marie Antoinette of France, and to his heirs only on condition that none of said possessions ever be removed from the capital and the Grand Duchy. They were to stay forever exactly where they were so they could “remain ornament of the state, for the use of the Public and to attract the curiosity of foreigners.” Grand Duke Francis Stephen agreed to the terms and the pact was signed in October 1737.

By this act, Anna Maria single-handedly saved the immense cultural heritage of Florence from succumbing to the fate of other Italian ducal estates that had been absorbed by European Powers. Mantua, for instance, was stripped bare when the Gonzaga line died out in 1627. The Gonzaga art collection was sold in its entirety to Charles I of England, and what was left was taken by the Habsurgs when the last Grand Duke of the French Gonzaga branch died in 1708. In 1731, the same fate befell the Duchy of Parma with the demise of the Farnese family. Three years after the death of the last Farnese duke, the ducal art collections were removed from the family palaces and shipped to the House of Bourbon rulers in Naples.

This would surely have happened to Florence as well if not for Anna Maria’s badassness. The vast majority of what is now in the Uffizi Gallery, Pitti Palace, Palazzo Vecchio, the Laurenziana library, Magliabecchiana library, Palatine library, a large chunk of the Bargello and everything in the smaller suburban Medici villas would be gone. Florence as we know it today would not exist. Think of how prescient Anna Maria was to recognize the value of her family holdings to city tourism. Mantua and Parma are lovely towns rich in history, but there is no comparison between them and Florence when it comes to tourist appeal. People go to Italy just to see Florence, and it’s not because of ruins or monuments like with Rome because the city doesn’t have many of those. They go to see the art. That’s Anna Maria’s doing.

Monday marks the 270th anniversary of her death. In her honor, Florence will hold celebrations of her life and legacy and Italy is releasing a stamp of a portrait of Anna Maria made by Antonio Franchi in the late 1600s and now in the Palazzo Pitti. The Reiss Engelhorn Museum is joining in the celebrations with a new exhibit dedicated to the Medici. The Medici – People, Power and Passion opens on February 17th and covers the family history from the founder Giovanni di Bicci until the Electress. She gets particular attention as the results of the exhumation study will be part of the exhibit.

The Little French Renaissance Book of Love

Multimedia, Renaissance

A recent addition to the British Library’s most excellent collection of digitized manuscripts is a valentine that puts contemporary efforts to shame. Written by Pierre Sala around 1500, the Petit Livre d’Amour (Little Book of Love) is a 5-inch by 3.7-inch book of poems and prose that he hand-wrote with gold ink on purple parchment and had professionally illuminated as a gift for his lover Marguerite Builloud. He even had a wood and leather carrying case made with rings on the edges so his lady love could hang it from a chain on her girdle.

Pierre Sala was a renown humanist, author, cook, personal valet and equerry to King Louis XII. Born and raised in Lyon, a center of the French Renaissance, his writings are important transitional works in the shift from the scriptural, patristic approach to scholarship of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance revival of classical philosophy and secular sources of knowledge. He wrote about the lives of Greek philosophers, collections of ancient aphorisms, histories, treatises and of course, romances and poetry.

He was also something of an accidental archaeologist and antiquities collector. When he built his house on the hill of Fourvière in the center of Lyons in 1514, he unearthed a large number of Franco-Roman remains from when the city was known as Lugdunum. This collection was so impressive the king came to visit it like a tourist in 1522. Pierre even named the house Antiquaille after them.

By then, he had sealed the deal with Marguerite. Perhaps this book helped. It is replete with references to the two of them. M and P are carved into the stylized floral pattern on the wooden cover. Their initials, drawn out of crossed compasses, decorate the pages like in a middle schooler’s Trapper Keeper. (I am aware I just seriously dated myself there). The poems and illustrations are all about love, of course, but not necessary mushy expressions thereof. The alternative name of the volume is “The Enigmas of Love” and the hardships of love, the obstacles, the dangers, are the dominant theme of the 12 drawings and the quatrains they illustrate.

Pierre starts off telling Marguerite that he wants to put his heart inside this daisy (Marguerite meaning daisy in French), that his thoughts will always be with her. The drawing opposite depicts a man putting his heart into daisy. His facial features are very basic, deliberately left so by the illustrator, a Parisian artist known as the Master of the Chronique scandaleuse, so another artist could fill in the details to make him look like Pierre. That artist was probably Jean Perréal, a painter in the employ of the French royal family who was a personal friend of Pierre’s. Perréal never did in fill the face, but he went on to make the rather dreamy portrait of Pierre at the end of the book.

The daisy allegory is followed by a man playing blind man’s bluff with three ladies, with the accompanying poem expressing his hope that if he can catch at least one of them, she won’t escape for a year. The next poem urges caution in Italian but recommends he not despair even though there are no assurances. The drawing across from it is of a solitary table with a candle burning on top.

The cautionary tales and juxtapositions — a wise man painting a fool, a pilgrim and a beggar illustrating the proverb “don’t limp in front of a lame person,” a man carrying a man on his shoulders while trampling another man on the ground illustrating the proverb “trampling on one man to help another” — continue through to the end.

My favorite is two women trying to catch flying hearts with a net. The quatrain describes the ladies as Friendly Expression and Courteous Manner who have stretched out their net to trap the unstable hearts that pass by. The best thing about that is the poem doesn’t spell out the word “heart.” It’s a little <3 drawing, a Renaissance emoticon! We don't know if she ever wore it like a hipster chain wallet, but Marguerite must have liked it, or at least not hated it too much, because she and Pierre were married and lived together at Antiquaille until his death in 1529.