Month: March 2013

Cirencester Roman cockerel cleans up real purty

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures

The enamelled bronze figurine of a cockerel unearthed in a child’s grave during a 2011 excavation of a Roman-era cemetery in Cirencester has been cleaned and conserved. Even caked with dirt you could see that it was a beautiful piece, inlaid with blue and light green enamel diamonds on a proudly puffed chest. Now that it has been liberated from its loamy cage, the decorative detail and quality of construction mark it as one of the finest pieces of its kind ever discovered.

Dating to the middle of the 2nd century A.D., the figurine is five inches tall with the stretched neck and open beak of a cockerel mid-crow. It has enamel inlay on the breast, wings, comb, tail and forming each wide eye. The enamel inlay is shaped to match the part, so while enamel on the chest is diamond-shaped, around the edges of sides it is elongated and curved like long feathers. The enamel in the comb is three mounds following the bronze shape, and on the back/wing they’re closely set crescents in columns. The tail has a swirly openwork decoration with matching enamel accents. The enamel is shades of blue, green and yellow, but may have had a brighter palette including red when new.

The construction is ingenious. Much like Gaul, it is divided into three parts. The main body is hollow, with the back/wing plate and the tail created separately and then soldered to the body. This saved metal and made it easier to craft and to decorate. Each part could be enameled individually and then put together.

There are only eight Roman cockerels of this kind known to have survived. Four were discovered in Britain and are similar in construction and enamel styles. They may have been a examples of a trend in figurines, or they have been created by the same artist or workshop. The Cirencester figurine is the only one of the cockerels found in Britain to have been excavated from a grave and the only one whose tail has survived.

The other cockerels were found in Germany and the Netherlands, but may have also originated from Britain which was a center of fine enamelwork. One particular workshop in Castleford, West Yorkshire, northern England, was renown for its high quality enamel and may well have produced the Cirencester piece. Cirencester is in the south, so if cockerel was from Castleford, it would have been an expensive import on top of the expense of production.

Archaeologist Neil Holbrook, from Cotswold Archaeology, said the work had “exceeded expectations”, particularly for highlighting its fine enamel detail.

“It reinforces what a fantastic article this is and how highly prized and expensive it must have been,” he said. “This must have cost, in current money, thousands of pounds to buy and countless hours to make, and so to actually put this into the grave of a two or three-year-old child is not something that you would do lightly.

“It really shows that this was a very wealthy, important family, and signifies the love that the parents had for the dead child.”

The cockerel was one of the attributes of the god Mercury, the messenger of the gods who guided the souls of the death to Hades. The parents of the child probably included the expensive and beautiful cockerel figurine as a tribute to the god to secure a safe trip to the afterlife for their beloved child.

The Corinium Museum in Cirencester is hoping to secure the cockerel for permanent display. While talks continue, the figurine will be on public view for the first time on March 27th in Bingham Hall on King Street, Cirencester. The cockerel will be exhibited during the Cotswold Archaeology Annual Lecture which this year is about childhood in ancient Rome. Professor Ray Laurence of Kent University will be the lecturer. Admission is free.

One of the oldest sundials found in Valley of Kings

Ancient

A University of Basel archaeological team has discovered one of Egypt’s (and thus the world’s) oldest sundials in the Valley of the Kings. Excavators found the flat limestone piece when clearing the entrance to a tomb near a group of stone huts where workers building the tombs lived during construction. The huts date to the 13th century B.C., and researchers believe the sundial dates to the same period. It may even have been used by the workers to determine how much toiling they had left to do for the day.

It doesn’t look very fancy. The flat surface of the limestone is marked with a black semicircle divided into 12 segments marking what we call for the sake of convenience “hours” even though they didn’t have the fixed length that our hours have. Each section is approximately 15 degrees wide but they’re fairly roughly drawn. There’s a hole where the lines meet in the middle of the baseline which is where a tool — a wooden or metal rod — would be inserted to cast the time-keeping shadow over the limestone. Small dots have been added at the top middle of each segment to mark the half hour.

The 12 sections divide the daylight between sunrise and sunset. Obviously that period is shorter in the winter, so winter hours were shorter than summer hours. Until more precise clocks became widespread in the Renaissance, variable hours continued to be used in Europe.
As much as it looks like something intended more for the proletariat than the aristocracy, it’s entirely possible that the sundial could have come from the wall of a royal tomb.

The division of the sun path into hours also played a crucial role in the so-called netherworld guides that were drawn onto the walls of the royal tombs. These guides are illustrated texts that chronologically describe the nightly progression of the sun-god through the underworld. Thus, the sun dial could also have served to further visualize this phenomenon.

The oldest Egyptian shadow clocks date to around 1500 B.C. The earliest surviving sundial dates to the reign of Thutmosis III (1479 – 1425 B.C.) and is in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin. It’s an L-shaped stone engraved with the pharaoh’s name. On the short of the side of the L is a hole where a plumb bob would hang to do the shadowing while the long side is marked with five circles to tell the time. As far as we know, this is the oldest portable timepiece.

Turn of the century Egyptologists thought that Egyptian obelisks were used to tell time from the length and angle of their shadows, but recent scholarship disputes that theory. There is nothing in the copious engravings on their sides that has anything to do with time marking. The idea that they were massive timepieces is probably a result of their being used as sundials centuries later when they were looted and taken to Europe by the Romans and Napoleon’s troops.

Van Dyck painting found thanks to online database

Modern(ish), Multimedia, Museums

A painting by Flemish Baroque master Anthony Van Dyck has been discovered in storage at the The Bowes Museum by an expert who came across it on the BBC’s Your Paintings website. Art historian and dealer Dr. Bendor Grosvenor was perusing the Public Catalogue Foundation’s massive database of all 210,000 publicly owned paintings in the UK (online at the Your Paintings site) to research an upcoming exhibition when he spotted the Portrait of Olive Boteler Porter.

The portrait had been in the collection since the museum opened in the market town of Barnard Castle in north east England in 1892. It was purchased in Paris by the museum’s founder John Bowes in 1866. When he bought it both the sitter and artist were unidentified. The museum later determined the subject was Olive Boteler Porter, wife of Endymion Porter, a good friend of Van Dyck’s, and lady-in-waiting to Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I, but the painting was still listed as “a copy after Sir Anthony Van Dyck.”

Years of caked dirt and yellowed varnish had kept the portrait off the gallery floor and in storage. When Grosvenor raised the prospect that it could be a work by the master himself, the Bowes enlisted him and his colleagues at Philip Mould & Company who have conserved more than 20 Van Dyck’s to clean the painting. Taking a minimalist approach — removing all but the oldest layer of varnish and doing some minor retouching in areas where the paint was removed by prior cleanings, most notably in the left eye — conservators were able to reveal the glowing delicacy of the skin tones, fabric and draping.

Philip Mould now officially confirmed that Grosvenor’s eye was unfailing, that the painting was a genuine Van Dyck. Other Van Dyck experts, including Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Rev. Dr. Susan Barnes, co-author of Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, were brought in to assess the cleaned portrait and they all agreed that it was the real thing. When Ms. Porter returned to the Bowes, she was given pride of place on the gallery wall. No more storage for her.

The wheel has come full circle for Olive Boteler Porter, who followed her husband out of the country in 1646 when all field resistance stopped in the Civil War and Parliament was in control of the country. Olive had taunted Parliament repeatedly. She had adopted the queen’s Catholicism in 1637 and was a most vigorous adherent of her new faith, converting several noblewomen and absconding with her dying father, brother of the Duke of Buckingham, in an attempt to save his immortal soul before it was too late. She and Queen Henrietta openly defied Parliament, flaunting their successful conversions in a parade at Christmas. The Puritan-dominated Parliament was not amused. They saw Olive as a fifth columnist, maybe even a spy for Spain, and that suspicion spilled over onto her husband even though he never converted.

The painting was probably done around the time of her conversion. Van Dyck painted several portraits of her, alone and with her husband. Endymion Porter also bears the distinction of being the only person Van Dyck ever painted standing next to him in a double portrait now in the Prado Museum.

When the Porters fled England, they probably took the painting with them, which is how it ended up in France, and under great financial duress, sold it. There’s a wax collector’s seal on the back that marks it as property of either Henri, 2nd Duc de Montbazon (d.1654) or his son Louis (d.1667). Two hundred years later, John Bowes bought the painting from his favorite Paris Dealer along with another painting attributed to Van Dyck said to be of Henrietta Maria. That was the one from the school of Van Dyck, while the lady-in-waiting is the real deal.

When I blogged about the Public Catalogue Foundation’s project and the Your Paintings database in December 2011, they had just reached the halfway mark with 104,000 paintings uploaded. Less than a year later, all 210,000 public paintings in the UK were photographed and uploaded to the BBC website. Out of the 210,000 works by 45,000 artists, 30,000 of them are unattributed. It’s tremendously exciting that the online database is directly responsible for matching one of those orphans with its artistic father.

The saga of the newly discovered Van Dyck was the subject of a recent episode of The Culture Show (not available outside the UK), a BBC program hosted by Bendor Grosvenor. You can also read a fascinating account of the characteristics that mark the portrait as Van Dyck’s work and the research into its provenance on Grosvenor’s website.

Amarna skeletons show hard living in the new capital

Ancient

Pharaoh Akhenaten, husband of Nefertiti, father of Tutankhamun, upended Egyptian society when he repudiated the traditional gods and established the monotheistic cult of the sun god Aten. In the fifth year of his 17-year reign (1349–1332 B.C.), Akhenaten began construction on a new city on the east bank of the Nile 200 miles south of Cairo and 250 miles north of Luxor, dedicated to the worship of Aten. The pharaoh wanted to start afresh, build a new capital untainted by any memory of previous rulers and religion. Two years into construction Amarna was officially declared the capital and two years after that, construction was finished. In the space of these few years, Amarna would become a city with a population of 20,000-30,000, mostly officials, soldiers, laborers, servants who followed Akhenaten and the court.

It was abandoned a few years after Akhenaten’s death until it was resettled in the Roman era. A thousand years without human habitation converts into archaeological gold, and because Amarna was built so quickly according to a plan by resident laborers during a time of social upheaval, it provides a unique window into life under Akhenaten. The cemeteries are particularly interesting because there’s no doubt about when and where the deceased lived, an advantage not often encountered in Egypt since cemeteries were usually separate from the towns of the living.

Since 2005, the Amarna Project team has been exploring the South Tombs Cemetery where the 90% of the population that was not wealthy was buried. Archaeologists found evidence that the standard of living for the vast majority of people in Amarna was not only far from the idyll depicted on tomb walls, but also below the basic threshold you’d expect to find in the capital of a wealthy empire.

The graves are simple, oblong pits marked by limestone boulder cairns with the occasional memorial stela or miniature limestone pyramid on top. Grave goods are similarly sparse. There’s a smattering of pottery, amulets, jewelry, cosmetics containers, but most of the graves include only human remains and the burial container. Out of the 200 graves excavated so far, only 20 wooden coffins have been discovered. Everyone else was wrapped in a textile and rolled in mats made of rigid plant material. Even the coffins are downmarket. Most of them are plain undecorated boxes. Some are human shaped and decorated with funerary scenes. One of those is painted with hieroglyphics that don’t mean anything; they’re gibberish, probably copied by an illiterate artist for an illiterate customer.

The bones themselves tell the most articulate story.

Researchers examining skeletons in the commoners’ cemetery in Amarna have discovered that many of the city’s children were malnourished and stunted. Adults show signs of backbreaking work, including high levels of injuries associated with accidents.

“We have evidence of the most stressed and disease-ridden of the ancient skeletons of Egypt that have been reported to date,” said University of Arkansas bioarchaeologist Jerome Rose (a National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration grantee), one of the team of experts examining the dead. “Amarna is the capital city of the Egyptian empire. There should be plenty of food . . . Something seems to be amiss.”

Analysis of the 159 individuals with at least 50% of the skeleton remaining revealed exceptionally high rates of nutritional deficiencies and workplace injuries. Cribra orbitalia (cranial lesions caused by malnutrition that appear in the upper orbits of the eyes) appear in 42.7% of the skeletons, porotic hyperostosis (lesions in the cranial vaults) in 2.9%, scurvy in 5.2%. Adults are shorter than ones from comparable sites. Child skeletons show significantly delayed growth starting from the age of just 7.5 months. The worst example showed a delay of two years, poor kid.

They may have been small and poorly fed, but they were worked like the mule. The 95 adult skeletons in the sample are riddled with degenerative joint disease (DJD), musculo-skeletal stress markers (MSM) and healed bone fractures. From the study:

A total of 71 adults (77.2 per cent) exhibited some evidence of DJD in at least one joint. The joints considered include the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, ankle and all three regions of the spine. More than half of the individuals exhibiting DJD had severe manifestation (42/71; 59.2 per cent) in at least one joint. At the population level, a lower frequency of individuals exhibited DJD of the lower limb (47.7 per cent), but in contrast to the upper limb, the DJD of the lower limb was more often severe (21.6 per cent). Upper limb DJD was nearly ubiquitous among the South Tombs Cemetery population (65.9 per cent), but it was less often severe (13.7 per cent). The spine also exhibited high frequencies of DJD development (56.7 per cent presence; 35.6 per cent severe), with the most common severe manifestation being observed in the lumbar region

All that hurried construction work required to build Amarna from the desert up in four years is the probable cause. The standard-size limestone block measured 20 inches by 10 inches and weighed 154 pounds. These could be carried by one person, unlike the larger blocks of earlier periods, but not without major damage to the bones and joints, especially of the lower body.

If there’s any consolation it’s that the small children were not subjected to this kind of work. Their malnourished little bodies showed no signs of DJD, MSM or trauma. They didn’t escape it for long, though. Two teenagers have injuries, one spondololysis (when the arch or back of the vertebra separates from the main body) and the other a fractured foot bone, which are likely to have been work-related.

Stolen 14th c. crucifix panel painting back in Venice

Looting, Medieval

After more than six decades on the lam, a 14th century crucifix panel painting attributed to Paolo Veneziano returned home on Monday, March 11th. Painted between 1335 and 1345 in the Gothic style made famous by Florentine masters Giotto and Cimabue, the crucifix is more than nine feet high and eight feet wide. The crucified Christ is the central figure, with the Virgin Mary looking sorrowfully at her son from the right of the crossbar and Saint John from the left. An angel painted above the cross looks straight out at the viewer.

It was removed from the Church of San Pantaleone Martyr in Venice at the end of World War II. Although most of the articles vaguely allude to Germans stealing it on their way out of occupied Italy, it seems they weren’t marauders so much as receivers of stolen goods. According to Edward B. Garrison’s 1959 book Italian Romanesque Panel Painting, it was the parish priest himself who illegally sold the masterpiece to German troops to raise desperately needed money for his war-ravaged community.

Consider its massive size, it’s quite remarkable that the painting remained intact during its smuggling travels. It touched down in Rome and France before winding up in a private collection in Germany. Last year, the collector consigned the crucifix to the Lempertz auction house in Cologne. When Lempertz experts investigated the ownership history of the piece, they realized it was never legitimately sold.

With the crucifix’s presence in the market the result of theft and considering its unique cultural importance, Lempertz did something I have never seen an auction house do: they bought it from the seller at cost and donated it to the Church of San Pantaleone. That is some gift. Medieval painted crucifixes are rarer than hen’s teeth on the market, and one of such massive size and quality is practically unheard of. The auctioneers were of course fully aware of what they were losing, but they made a conscious decision to make the ethical choice rather than ride willful blindness all the way to the bank like so many auction houses before them have done.

“It’s a work that has no equal in the market,” says the Lempertz specialist in Old Master Paintings Mariana M. de Hanstein. “If it didn’t have the history it has, the pre-sale estimate would probably be around 700,000 euros. But this is a work that cannot be sold. It is a moral issue. It does not belong to the market, but to a large international museum.”

The managing partner of Lempertz Henrik Hanstein said: “In the beginning we were excited about the delivery of a work of Venetian painting from the fourteenth century of such quality. But then it became immediately clear to us: this work does not belong in an auction but to its original home, the church that Venetians with their wonderful dialect called San Pantaleon. We are happy to be able to return so significant a work to the city of Venice, to which we are grateful for so much extraordinary art.”

Note to self: when you hit the lottery, go buy all your stuff at Lempertz.

On November 17th, a ceremony was held in Cologne officially returning the painting to Venice. Before the Archbishop of Cologne Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Italian consul Eugenio Sgrò, Italian ambassador Elio Menzione, the crucifix was formally handed over to Monsignor Francesco Moraglia, Patriarch of Venice. Before settling down permanently in Venice’s ever-loving arms, however, the masterpiece made one more stop. From February 15th until the end of the month, it stood in the place of the papal throne in the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City. On February 28th, it witnessed Pope Benedict XVI’s final address to the College of Cardinals before his formal abdication and departure to Castel Gandolfo.

Now that the crucifix is in Venice, it is being examined by conservators. Once it gets a clean bill of health, the painting will be moved back to the Church of San Pantaleone Martyr.