Month: February 2013

“Ape Woman” gets decent burial 153 years later

Modern(ish)

Julia Pastrana was born in Sinaloa, Mexico, in 1834, with two congenital diseases that would be her fortune and her curse. Generalized hypertrichosis lanuginosa caused her face and body to be covered in long, straight, thick black hair, her jaw to jut out and her ears and nose to be disproportionately large; gingival hyperplasia thickened her lips and gums.

The circumstances of her childhood are unclear, muddled by later promotional legends. According to A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities a book by Dr. Jan Bondeson whose cover Julia graces, she was found in a cave when she was two years old being cared for by a so-called root-digging Indian named Espinosa who insisted the child was not hers. She did love her, though, and raised her until her death. When Espinosa died, the governor of Sinaloa took Julia on as a servant. It wasn’t charity that inspired his actions; he wanted to study her as a medical curiosity.

Tired of being mistreated, Julia left his employ in 1854. According to some sources she was bought as a circus sideshow — slavery was illegal but circus exhibits were still bought and sold — by a Mexican customs agent who took her to the United States. American impresario M. Rates claimed he found her in Mexico and convinced her to go on the sideshow circuit in North America. He exhibited her as the “Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman” and she was a sensation. Doctors examined her, declaring her a human-orangutan hybrid and a new species of animal altogether.

She had a lovely soprano voice and a petite figure (she was just four feet, five inches tall) with tiny hands and feet. She was a nimble and graceful dancer. Her singing and dancing were often mentioned in surprised tones for their quality and elegance. Her mind was also far from brutish. She spoke three languages and was by all accounts a kind, warm, intelligent person, an excellent conversationalist and a generous donor to charitable causes. She was also punctilious about her appearance. It may have been monetized by its association with beasts of the wild, but she always made sure her hair was elaborately coiffed and her dresses pretty and feminine albeit very short for Victorian sensibilities.

In New York she met a Theodore Lent. He married her and became her manager, doubtless the former was a means to secure the latter. He brought her to Europe where she was a great success. Lent made sure she had very little in the way of society, despite her yearning for friends and affection, out of fear that if people knew she was a gentle, well-read, fully human woman, her shows wouldn’t sell as well.

She got pregnant during the European tour. They were in Moscow in 1860 when she went into labour. Her son Theodore was born with hypertrichosis and only lived 35 hours. Julia died from a birth-related fever a few days later. Her last words were reportedly “I die happy; I know I have been loved for myself.”

Unfortunately, her husband put the lie to those sad final words. He showed his true disgusting colors after the death of his wife and child by either selling their bodies to a Russian anatomy professor for £500 and then buying them back for £800 after they were embalmed when he realized he could still profit off of them, or by having them embalmed and taking them on the road. He nailed the feet of his wife and little baby to boards with poles so they could be displayed standing up. Then he married a bearded lady whom he named Zenora Pastrana and billed her as Julia’s sister. He and his new wife traveled Europe on exhibit next to the corpses of his dead wife and child.

In 1921, Julia and little Theodore’s bodies were purchased by Earl Jaeger Lund, a Norwegian show promoter who put them on display at his amusement park and on tours until the 1970s. Finally in 1972 there was enough of an outcry about this horrendous spectacle that the remains were put in storage at the Oslo fairground. They saw even more mistreatment out of the public eye. Vandals broke in and damaged Julia’s body in 1976, and threw the baby’s body into a ditch where it was devoured by mice. In 1979, Julia’s body was stolen only to be recovered shortly thereafter in a suburban garbage dump, her arm severed.

After it was recovered, Julia’s body was moved to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Oslo University Hospital where it remained in storage from 1997 until now.

In 2005, Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata, then in Oslo for a residency, began to campaign for Julia Pastrana’s body to be returned to Mexico for the proper Catholic burial that had so long been denied her. It took years before she got some attention, but in 2008 she submitted paperwork in favor of Julia’s repatriation to Norway’s National Committee for the Evaluation of Research on Human Remains. Last year the committee admitted that it was unlikely Julia Pastrana would have wanted to end up a specimen.

There were still some hoops to jump through. The University was amenable to returning the body, but they weren’t comfortable just handing her over to Laura Barbata because she was the only one who had asked.

A breakthrough came after the current governor of Sinaloa, Mario López Valdez, joined Ms. Barbata’s cause last year and petitioned for Pastrana’s repatriation. The Mexican ambassador to Denmark, Norway and Iceland, Martha Bárcena Coqui, offered to work with the university to accept the body.

“We understood that she must have suffered enormously during her lifetime and that her remains did not receive the respect they deserved for many years,” Ms. Coqui said by e-mail.

The institute agreed to begin the process of transferring Ms. Pastrana to Mexican custody last August.

Last Thursday, Barbata confirmed Julia’s identity before her body was sealed in a coffin. On Tuesday, Julia’s mortal remains were finally laid to rest in a cemetery in Sinaloa de Leyva. It’s touching to see crowds of people attending her funeral and her white coffin covered with flowers. Her last show was finally worthy of the person she was.

Louis I of Orléans found in The Agony in the Garden

Medieval, Museums

Conservators at Madrid’s Prado Museum have uncovered a rare portrait of Louis I, Duke of Orléans, son of Charles V of France and brother of Charles VI, hidden under overpaint in The Agony in the Garden, a 15th-century French painting depicting Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane while Peter, John and James slumber. The museum first encountered the work in February of 2011, when the private owner offered it to the Prado for study and potential acquisition. The lab gave it the full analytical monty: ultraviolet photography, X-rays, Infra-red reflectography, tests on the pigments and the panel.

They found that the painting was an extremely high quality piece. The pigments contain large amounts of expensive lapis lazuli painted on a Baltic oak panel. Tree ring analysis of the oak indicated the tree was felled in 1382. The X-rays and Infra-red reflectography revealed the artist had painted two figures on the bottom left which were later painted over with a thick layer of brown. The standing figure is clearly a saint, identified by the lamb at her feet as Saint Agnes. At her feet, a male figure kneels holding a scroll and looking at the scene in the garden. The man is dressed in sumptuous clothes that were fashionable around 1400. According to painterly convention, his posture and position indicates that he was included in the painting because he or his family commissioned the work.

Conservators could not identify the kneeling figure from the X-rays. The pattern on his sleeves was a likely clue — they could be a family emblem — but it wasn’t clear what they were. Saint Agnes was another clue. She takes a protective posture in the painting so could be the patron saint of the man kneeling in front of her. Researchers looked for someone in the upper ranks of French nobility with a connection to Saint Agnes and Louis of Orléans came up. Agnes was the patron saint both of his father King Charles V, to whom he was devoted, and of his wife Valentina Visconti, daughter of the Duke of Milan.

There are only three extant portraits of Louis, all of them manuscript illuminations. If the Donor could be confirmed as Louis of Orléans, this painting would be the only one of him ever found. Restorers decided to attempt to remove the overpainting to reveal the figure if it could be accomplished without damaging the original paint. The top layer was a natural resin varnish, easily removed using a light solvent. There were two layers of overpainting, the most recent applied in the 19th century or later. The overpainting was separated from the original paint by an isolating layer of varnish, but because the original paint is a very fragile egg tempera, it was too risky to use any solvents. Instead, restorers removed the overpaint with scalpel, looking through a stereoscopic microscope at the highest magnification so they could identify non-original pigment not visible to the naked eye.

Once liberated from their brown prison, the figures were revealed in all their brilliant glory. The colors were far brighter and richer than the colors on the saints and Jesus. The Donor’s scroll was found to be inscribed with the first words of the Psalm 50, aka the Miserere mei. The decorations on the sleeves turned out to be gold nettle leaves and they looked like appliqué rather than a fabric print.

The nettles were the key to the identification of Louis of Orléans. The nettle leaf was one of the duke’s emblems, one he particularly favored from 1399 until his death in 1407. Inventories of his possessions have survived and the 1403 inventory list “LXV feuilles d’or en façon d’orties,” meaning 65 gold leaves in the shape of nettles. He would have used these to decorate his clothes, like the dramatic fur-lined batwing houppelande the Donor wears in the painting.

Comparisons with the manuscript depictions of Louis support the identification. The distinctive nose and chin are similar in all the images, but his bald pate is only visible in the painting because Louis wears a hat in all three illuminations. He can’t wear a hat in Gethsemane, however, because he’s in the presence of God, Father and Son, no less. That makes this portrait even more remarkable.

Once Louis’ identity was pinned down, researchers were able to extrapolate from that the possible artist. There are very few surviving panel paintings from this period, and the style and quality of this one is unique so there is no means to devise attribution by comparing techniques. Louis of Orléans had painter in his household. Colart de Laon worked as a painter and as personal valet to the duke from 1391 until Louis’ death. He then did the same work for Louis’ son Charles until 1411. Contemporary sources praise him as one of the most significant artist of the day, but none of his work has been known to survive.

This painting is a small piece, probably intended for a use in a private chapel rather than a large church. The Gethsemane theme and the Miserere mei were usually included in funerary artworks, and since Louis’ family is not included in the panel, it’s likely that it was commissioned by his wife or son after his assassination.

Louis I, Duke of Orléans, Count of Valois, Duke of Touraine, Count of Blois, Angoulême, Périgord, Dreux, and Soissons, regent of France when his older brother Charles VI, aka Charles the Mad, went insane, was assassinated by his cousin and co-regent John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. John’s courage against Ottoman forces in the Battle of Nicopolis (1396) earned him his nickname and his bullheaded vanity helped ensure his side was utterly routed. You can read all about it in one of my favorite books of all time, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Many of these events are covered in Book IV of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles, which sadly I cannot find for free online, but here’s a full version available for 90 cents.

The Prado decided to purchase the painting, needless to say. They cleaned the entire thing, removing the overpaint that had darkened and dulled the rest of the figures and revealing the original brilliant color. The Agony in the Garden is now on display in Room 58A of the Villanueva Building. For more about the painting and restoration, watch these subtitled videos on the Prado’s website.

Sir James Tillie’s body IS in Sir James Tillie’s tomb

Modern(ish)

The archaeological investigation of Sir James Tillie’s mausoleum on the grounds of Pentillie Castle, the estate he built in Cornwall in 1698, has revealed the skeletal remains of a man in the vault underneath the current floor of the turret structure. Although there are no plans to remove the bones for laboratory analysis and DNA testing, the context strongly suggests these are the mortal remains of Sir James Tillie. As Ted Coryton, current owner of Pentillie Castle, says: “There is not really any doubt about who the remains belong to.”

That’s because Sir James’ final wishes in regards to the disposition of his body were eccentric, to say the least, and the odds of anyone else getting buried in the folly of a private estate in the hundred or so years between his death and the modifications to the mausoleum are slim to none.

Sir James Tillie was a self-made man who, as far as we can discern from the many lies he told about himself, went from Baronet Sir John Coryton’s land agent to knight to husband of Sir John’s widow and owner of the estate he once managed. (It was rumored that that last step was accomplished with the aid of poison.) His meteoric rise was accompanied with a very high self-opinion, so high, in fact, that he believed not even death could keep him down for long.

He had a folly built on Mount Ararat, the highest hill on his estate with beautiful views of his mansion and the hairpin bend of the River Tamar. Instead of being interred in the tower, Sir James ordered that his body was to be dressed in his best clothes and bound to a large chair facing a window. He died on November 17th, 1713, and his servants fulfilled his wishes. There he would sit, next to his favorite books, a bottle of port and his pipe, until his resurrection which he was convinced would occur within two years of his death.

For two years, his servants brought his decaying body food and drink, but when the expected resurrection event never happened, they decided they had to inter Sir James’ remains instead of letting him sit there, exposed to the elements, rotting until the bonds could no longer hold him to the chair. He was buried and a statue of Sir James in his chair was placed at the same window where his body has sat watch for two years.

No specific evidence of where the remains were buried has survived. He might have been buried in the parish church of St. Mellion, the traditional resting place of the Coryton family, or in another parish church. He might have been buried in the mausoleum. No headstone or documentation of his final resting place has ever been found.

The estate remained in Tillie hands for three generations after Sir James’ death, and then returned through marriage to the Coryton family. They appear to have modified the mausoleum during an expansion of the estate in 1810. That was the last time it was maintained, and although the estate in general survived in decent condition until a neglectful shut-in owner let it go to pot in the late 20th century, the mausoleum did not. It was crumbling, structurally unsound, choked with ivy and weeds.

When Ted Coryton and his wife inherited the property in 2007, they initiated an extensive program of restoration. Once the main house was in tip-top shape, they turned their attention to the gardens and to the mausoleum. With grants from Natural England and the Country Houses Foundation, last year the mausoleum was finally able to get some attention. The statue was sent to Cliveden Conservation in Bath for restoration while back at the folly conservators cleared the vegetation, did some long overdue mortar pointing and rebuilding of the walls, repaired cracks and rebuilt the tower crenellations.

In order to accomplish all the work that needed doing, they had to stabilize the floor so they could build scaffolding. In October of last year, builders dug an exploratory hole in the floor and found a brick vaulted roof underneath the granite slabs. This was probably a function of the addition built in the early 19th century which made the original first floor into the ground floor to accommodate a new plinth.

Archaeologist Oliver Jessop explored the vaulted area and found that it was structurally sound, lined with plaster with the brick vaulted ceiling in excellent condition. He also found a human skeleton and the remains of a wooden object covered with leather and studs. It’s not clear exactly what this piece was, but its age and style suggest that it might be an early 18th century chair, perhaps the very one Sir James’ sat in awaiting his resurrection.

Pictures of the remains have not been released out of respect for what turned out to be Sir James’ final resting place despite his belief in his own immortality. The Coryton plans to publish more information about the mausoleum restoration. If you have a chance to visit Pentillie Castle in person, the estate is holding Garden Open Days in March, April and May. A member of the family will lead groups on tours through the grounds, including the newly restored kitchen garden which until recently was a mass of brambles, and share first-hand information about the restoration. The mausoleum won’t yet be available for tours at that point as work is ongoing, but visitors will get to hear all the juicy history they’ve uncovered thus far in the process.

Men jailed for theft of Qing artifacts from museum

Looting, Modern(ish), Museums

Just in time for Lunar New Year, two men have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for the theft of two Qing Dynasty artifacts worth a combined $3.2 million from the Durham University Oriental Museum last April. Lee Wildman and Adrian Stanton admitted to having plotted to break in to the museum, but they claimed they never went through it. On the witness stand, they testified that they met some unnamed “Northern men” in a silver Mercedes at a parking lot. These men commissioned them to steal any Chinese artifacts they could get their hands on, the older the better, but after casing the museum Wildman and Stanton backed out of the deal and instead only agreed to provide the mysterious northerners with stolen vehicles.

Judge Christopher Prince did not find their statements credible. In fact, he put it rather more baldly: “I have been struck over two days of this hearing over the amount of disingenuous lies told by the two defendants. I have not heard so many lies from the witness box for a very long time.”

Considering the evidence against them, it certainly was a brazen defense. There’s CCTV footage of Wildman and Stanton at the museum on March 29th. They make a beeline for the Chinese gallery and examined the display cabinets, testing the locks in preparation for their return. Wildman claimed that this was their sole attempt to burglarize the place, that they were thwarted when the museum staff made them check their backpacks and that when they returned empty-handed to the silver Mercedes, the Northerners were angry that had failed to steal anything. In broad daylight. With their faces clearly visible to the cameras. And security guards and museum visitors milling around. Because apparently these Mercedes guys were super keen on the worst burglary plan in the world.

Between March 29th and the April 5th break-in, Wildman and Stanton made several trips from their hometown of Walsall to Durham using stolen vehicles with fake license plates. Police identified them with number plate recognition cameras. The two defendants explained this evidence of their continuing involvement in the plan by saying they were providing the silver Mercedes guys with stolen cars to use during the burglary. The fact that several accomplices would testify that the stolen cars and cloned plates were used by Wildman and Stanton themselves before, during and after the crime didn’t deter them.

On the night of April 5th, the two drove to the museum in an Audi A3 with fake license plates. The thieves spent about 40 minutes breaking a hole in an outside wall and no more than one minute inside the museum. Using flashlights, they each went to two separate cabinets and stole the 18th century carved jade bowl and 17th century Dehua porcelain fairy boat. The alarm went off but they were so quick about it that they were gone before the police got to the museum. It’s almost liked they knew exactly what they wanted to steal, perhaps from an earlier visit?

After the smash and grab, they left in the same Audi. They hid the stolen pieces in a scrubland next to Harle Street in the town of Browney two miles from Durham. They changed cars in Browney and drove back to Walsall. The next day Stanton returned to Harle Street to pick up the Audi, changing the plates one more time.

It seemed like all that careful planning might have paid off, but when Wildman went back to the brownfield to recover the artifacts, he couldn’t find them. He was witnessed looking around the field in an agitated state until sunset. Acting on a tip, police arrived and arrested Wildman. He was released without charge shortly thereafter due to a prosecutorial oversight. Eight days later, authorities found the stolen artifacts in the field, hidden under a bush.

Wildman and Stanton hid out in various hotels in the Midlands until May 1st, when they were recognized thanks to a story on BBC’s Crimewatch show. The police arrested them at Baron’s Court Hotel in Walsall. In the room police found £10,000 in cash and a computer with information on the fake plates. Wildman said his £5,000 was given to him by his brother and he had no idea where Stanton got his identical sum of cash. A car parked outside was found containing a ski mask, a crowbar and fake license plates. Wildman said he didn’t know anything about that car.

Their accomplices — the guy who drove Stanton back to Harle Street to pick up the Audi, Stanton and Wildman’s girlfriends who booked their hotels while they were on the lam and another woman who allowed them to use her credit card to book the rooms — were arrested and confessed to their roles in the scheme. The driver got 20 months in jail. The girlfriends were sentenced 6 months in jail, 12 months suspended, and 200 hours of community service. Their friend with the credit card was sentenced to 4 months in prison, also suspended for a year.

Lee Wildman was sentenced to nine years in jail. Adrian Stanton got eight years. They refused to name the men who commissioned the crime because they said their families had been threatened, so the silver Mercedes cabal remains at large.

Both artifacts have been returned to the museum and will go back on display after an extensive review to beef up security practices.

Dense cluster of 35 pyramids found in Sudan

Ancient

Researchers have discovered the remains of 35 pyramids clustered together in surprisingly close quarters in the archaeological site of Sedeinga on the left bank of the Nile in Sudan. The entire site is huge, covering more than 30 hectares, and has a range of monuments from the temple of Queen Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III, built in the second half of the 14th century B.C. to a 10th century A.D. Christian church.

In Amenhotep’s day, Sedeinga was in the Egyptian colony of Nubia but it became part of the independent Kingdom of Kush after the collapse of Egypt’s New Kingdom in 1070 B.C. The first 500 years or so of the kingdom is known as the Napatan (after Napata, which may have been the capital during this period) during which Egyptian hieroglyphics were used in inscriptions. From 500 B.C. through to around the 2nd century A.D. when the Kingdom declined under Roman pressure, the period is known as the Meroitic (after Meroë, possibly the new capital) as is the writing system that developed from the 2nd century B.C. on.

It’s the late Meroitic necropolis that the French Archaeological Mission to Sedeinga has been excavating since 2009. The pyramids were built over the course of several centuries with tombs next to them. They are so densely packed together because when the space began to fill up, later pyramids were squeezled in between and older ones reused. Just to give you an idea of how tight these quarters were, in the 2011 field season, researchers found 13 pyramids rubbing shoulders in 5,381 square feet, a space only slightly larger than an NBA basketball court.

The biggest pyramids they discovered are about 22 feet (7 meters) wide at their base with the smallest example, likely constructed for the burial of a child, being only 30 inches (750 millimeters) long. The tops of the pyramids are not attached, as the passage of time and the presence of a camel caravan route resulted in damage to the monuments. [Excavation director Vincent] Francigny said that the tops would have been decorated with a capstone depicting either a bird or a lotus flower on top of a solar orb.

Capstones have been discovered on the site, as have artifacts and human remains. Faience amulets depicting the deity Bes and an ankh on a crescent moon, pottery, beads and shells that were once strung together to make jewelry, a copper bowl, a stela with a Meroitic inscription and an offering table with a Meroitic dedication to a woman named “Aba-la,” which may be a nickname for “grandmother” (abuela!). The translation reads:

Oh Isis! Oh Osiris!
It is Aba-la.
Make her drink plentiful water;
Make her eat plentiful bread;
Make her be served a good meal.

The Kingdom of Kush borrowed a lot from Egyptian culture, which makes sense given its roots as an Egyptian colony. They worshiped the Egyptian pantheon and obviously their funerary architecture was inspired by Egypt. The Kush pyramids are smaller and pointier and several of the pyramid bases discovered in Sedeinga have an unusual circular structure inset within the square with cross-braces connecting the circle to the corners. Outside of Sedeinga, only one other pyramid has been found discovered with this circular element. There’s no equivalent in Egyptian architecture and there’s no structural purpose to it.

The grave of a child that was discovered late last year might shed some light on the curious circle design. The grave was covered by a brick circular cap. This may have been a local tumulus construction technique that was combined with the Egyptian fashion to produce a pyramid with a circle inside.