Month: April 2013

Body scanner finds Roman fresco under 19th c. fake

Ancient, Modern(ish)

The full body scanners that have contributed so much to the hell that is modern air travel have just redeemed themselves in my eyes. Dr. J. Bianca Jackson of the University of Rochester used terahertz spectroscopy, the same electromagnetic radiation lying between kitchen microwaves and the infrared in your remote control that looks through your clothes at airports, to examine a fresco from the Louvre’s Campana collection. Underneath Trois hommes armés de lances (Three men armed with lances), a surface fresco in Roman style that was applied to an ancient wall in the 19th century, she found a face, part of what is probably an original Roman-era fresco.

This an important breakthrough because the body scanning technology found something that none of the other imagining technologies — X-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, microscopy — in use today were able to detect. An analysis using X-ray fluorescence first confirmed that there might be something under the surface, but there were no specifics. It could have been anything — a textural change, a different material beneath the plaster — or nothing at all.

“No previous imaging technique, including almost half a dozen commonly used to detect hidden images below paintings, forged signatures of artists and other information not visible on the surface has revealed a lost image in this fresco,” Jackson said. “This opens to door to wider use of the technology in the world of art, and we also used the method to study a Russian religious icon and the walls of a mud hut in one of humanity’s first settlements in what was ancient Turkey.”

Terahertz spectroscopy is well-suited to conservation use because it’s a such a mild form of radiation it doesn’t harm the object being studied even in the smallest way. With so many systems used for conservation purposes, there’s a price to pay in deterioration of the artifact being conserved. Even X-rays and ultraviolet, non-invasive though they are, still cause some damage on a molecular level.

There’s no way at present to determine the date of the newly discovered face, but the art history strongly suggests it’s an original Roman fresco. Trois hommes armés de lances is one of three fragmentary ancient frescoed walls at the Louvre that were acquired by Giampietro Campana, a 19th century collector who was director of the Vatican pawnbroking charity Monte di Pietà and an amateur but very much accomplished archaeologist. His access to Papal properties gave him the opportunity to excavate in the heart of ancient Rome and Etruria. He made several major discoveries like the columbarium of Pomponius Hylas which he published in scholarly journals.

He also paid attention to artifacts that nobody before him had considered worthwhile. The terracotta reliefs used as decorative architectural elements along the roof edges and walls of public buildings still bear his name — Campana reliefs — because in the mid-19th century when archaeology was in its infancy, diggers were looking for big treasures, important works of art, jewelry, fancy things, not roof tiles. Campana alone recognized their historical and aesthetic significance.

He loved the splashy stuff too, mind you. From his excavations and from extensive purchases he built a private collection of sculpture, pottery, gold, jewels, that was one of the greatest ever assembled. His palazzo at the corner of Via del Babuino and Piazza del Popolo, which if you know Rome at all is a location TO DIE FOR, also served as his personal museum, although only people with letters of introduction were allowed to visit and only one day a week. One of those visitors, who probably needed no letters of introduction, was Pope Pius IX who went to see Campana’s collection in 1846.

Notwithstanding his expertise and genuine scholarly bent when it came to archaeology, Campana, or rather his restorers, had a very heavy hand by our standards. Hell, even by 19th century standards they systematically blurred line between restoration and fraud. The three men armed with spears are actually composites. They were created by (rather sloppily, actually) sticking together random fresco fragments. The fragments were all genuinely ancient, but it was a restorer who created the composition, assembled and stuck the pieces together to make them look like a full sized fresco. The restorer does not appear to have attempted to integrated the old picture into the new, as the placement of the newly found fresco proves.

There is very little documentation of the Campana collection. We don’t know who restored what or what the intent was. It’s unlikely to have been larceny by false promise, if I may invoke my Law & Order-derived legalese. Campana wasn’t much of a seller. He liked to buy and keep. What’s more likely is that the original painting was covered up with this chunky plaster mosaic just to make it look better, more important, more handsome, more worthy of its rarified surroundings in the Campana museum.

Giampietro Campana never did get his museum made. In November of 1857, he was arrested for embezzlement of which he was guilty beyond any sliver of a shadow of doubt. In July of the next year, he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in the galleys and to pay a massive fine. His sentence was commuted to exile. On 28 April 1859, Giampietro Campana gave his collection, much of which he had used as collateral on loans, to the Papacy, keeping only the furniture.

To reimburse Campana’s creditors (starting with itself) the Church did something so short-sighted, so wrong, so stupid I can barely stand to write it: they auctioned off his entire collection. England bought some of it for its new Kensington museum. Russia bought almost 500 antique vases, statues and jewelry for the Hermitage. The lion’s share went to Napoleon III who got first dibs on anything in the catalog before the sale started. He bought everything that was remaining: 11,835 artifacts for 4.8 million francs. Most of that massive collection went to the Louvre where today it has a room of its own, the Campana gallery. The only thing from the Campana collection that the Pope kept was 400 Roman and Byzantine gold coins.

Campana returned to Rome after the Unification of Italy in 1870. He died ten years later, his epic collection scattered to great museums around the world. After his death, his palazzo on the Piazza del Popolo was razed and built over.

Oldest dinosaur embryo fossils discovered in China

Ancient

An international team of paleontologists led by University of Toronto professor Robert Reisz have unearthed an Early Jurrasic bone bed of fossilized dinosaur embryos and eggshells in China’s Lufeng County. There are more than 200 disarticulated bones of embryos at various stages of growth in the bed. They are 190 to 197 million years old, which makes them the oldest dinosaur embryos ever found. A fossilized nursery of Massospondylus dinosaurs excavated in South Africa (also by Robert Reisz and colleagues) starting in 2005 date to 190 million years ago. Until the Lufeng find, they held the record of oldest embryos ever discovered. Most of the dinosaur embryos that have been found are from the Cretaceous period (ca. 145 million to 65 million years ago).

Like the South African find, these embryos are also of a sauropodomorph type of dinosaur, probably Lufengosaurus, a long-necked herbivore. Unlike the Massospondylus fossils, these were not intact eggs and nests, but rather an assortment of bones and broken eggshells. This has provided researchers with an extremely valuable opportunity to study dinosaur embryology by examining the bone tissues at the cellular level. You can’t do much of that when the embryos are still locked into their complete eggs.

The bed was first discovered three years ago by a Timothy Huang, a professional chemist and amateur archaeologist. The fully excavated site is just about three feet square and only four to eight inches thick. The 200 tiny bones were all concentrated in this small area. Since they are at different stages of development, this was not a single nest. Researchers believe the spot was once near water — sauropodomorphs often laid eggs next to water so the wet sediment would keep the eggs from drying out — and that it flooded, smothering the eggs which eventually fell apart.

Upon analysis, scientists found 20 wee femurs half an inch to an inch long belonging to different embryos. The team concentrated on the fourth trochanter, a bone projection where the leg muscles attach to the thighbone, and found that Lufengosaurus developed rapidly in the egg, like modern birds and mammals rather than at the slower speeds of reptiles today. The radial growth of the femur was asymmetric, greater next to the fourth trochanter which strongly suggests the little guys were kicking around in there, developing their leg muscles and strengthening their bones before birth.

[T]he tiniest femurs showed no signs of a fourth trochanter. Femurs from embryos that were a bit older had budding trochanters whose interiors were made up mostly of cartilage. And the largest, most developed femurs had big, fully hardened trochanters.

From studies of living animals such as mice, other scientists have shown that the development of trochanters and other bone processes require early muscle contraction during embryonic development.

“Lots of animals, such as birds and mammals, move inside the egg [or womb]. And of course, our babies move like crazy,” Reisz said.

That’s because “if the muscles don’t contract, the processes on the bones do not form … By comparison with living things, we can argue that [bone development in Lufengosaurus embryos] was also mediated by muscle contraction.”

The bone tissue samples provide the oldest examples of complex organic material from a terrestrial vertebrate ever preserved in situ. It was an unexpected find because these small bonelets were porous, so you’d think they’d have been devastated by corrosion, decay and contamination. This may give paleontologists a whole new area of study to focus on going forward.

“That suggests to us that other dinosaur fossils might have organic remains,” [Reisz] says. “We just haven’t looked at them in the right ways.”

Vast site preserves 400 years of Roman London

Ancient, Treasures

A six-month excavation by Museum of London Archaeology at the construction site of Bloomberg’s future European headquarters in the center of London has revealed layer upon beautifully-preserved layer of Roman habitation from the earliest days in 40 A.D. to the collapse of Roman rule in the 5th century. Just a few yards from the Thames and waterlogged by the Walbrook River, one of London’s famous “lost rivers” that disappeared under the city when they were diverted into culverts to make way for development, the three acre site is replete with organic remains in incredible condition. Entire streets have survived, as have the remains of shoulder-high wooden walls, extensive wood foundations, complex waste drainage systems, a deep wooden well and a wooden door that is the second Roman wood door ever discovered in London. The extent of preservation has inspired archaeologists to dub this find “the Pompeii of the North.”

In addition to the structural remains, the site has proven a motherlode for artifacts as well. A team of 60 archaeologists has excavated about 3,500 tons of soil (that’s 21,000 wheelbarrows full) by hand to find more than 10,000 objects, the largest group of small finds ever recovered in a single excavation in London. The collection includes hundreds of leather shoes, a straw basket, more than 100 fragments of writing tablets, textiles, an amber amulet shaped like a gladiator helmet, a mysterious leather piece richly decorated with a scene of a gladiator battling mythical creatures, a cavalry harness with clappers that jingle when a horse moves, a group of high-quality pewter vessels that were thrown down a well probably for ritual purposes, and the greatest number of fist and phallus good luck charms ever found at one site.

Archaeologists were able to dig far deeper than usual due to the scale of the planned construction. The Bloomberg Place development at Great Queen Street will be a major high-rise that requires attendant deep foundations. Thus experts had the rare opportunity to dig 40 feet below street level to the first Roman settlement layer. The location is also of huge significance. This neighborhood was the bed of the Walbrook, the very center of Roman Londinium where, on the east bank of the tributary, the Romans built a port, the governor’s palace and a temple of Mithras. The Mithraeum was unearthed in 1954 by Welsh archaeologist William Francis Grimes, director of the Museum of London, after Victorian buildings damaged by bombs in World War II were demolished for the construction of an office building.

The discovery of the Mithraeum was the most important discovery of 20th century London. Crowds flocked to see the ruins and a public campaign to save them from threatened destruction led to their being relocated down the road to Temple Court where they still stand today. Researchers therefore had high expectations that the Bloomberg Place dig would result in archaeological finds of great significance. Obviously these were more than met. They even found a new section of the Temple of Mithras.

The artifacts are being cleaned and conserved at the Museum of London. The organic elements will be freeze-dried to preserve them. It’s not clear to me how the extensive city layers will be handled, but the construction project has all along planned to return the Mithraeum to its original site and integrate it into a public display. Now they just have a lot more to display than they planned.

The London Museum of Archaeology was kind enough to allow me access to their Dropbox account so of course I took everything and ran. Enjoy the media dump of awesomeness.

Only surviving undeveloped Revolutionary War POW camp needs help

Modern(ish)

In the summer of 1781, the President of Pennsylvania, Joseph Reed, was commanded by Continental Congress to establish a prisoner of war camp in his state to accommodate British troops captured at battles up and down the eastern seaboard. The ones imprisoned after the surrender of General John Burgoyne to General Gates at Saratoga, New York, in 1777, were the most long-suffering. They had been moved around for nearly four years by then, including a deadly forced march along the wintry Appalachian Trail in October of 1780. Others were captured after the Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina, fought on January 17, 1781. Still others were transfers from the Hessian Barracks in Frederick, Maryland, which was used as a prison in 1781.

The location chosen was a field a few miles southeast of York between the town and the Susquehanna River, “so as to be convenient to throw them across the river in any emergency,” as Colonel James Wood of the York Militia put it. The prisoners arrived in August of 1781 and were promptly put to work helping build the sharpened picket fence 15 feet high, the wooden stockade just inside the fence and the fieldstone cabins to house the prisoners. The new camp was dubbed Camp Security. Outside the fence more fieldstone huts were built to house the wives and children who followed their captured husbands. This one was dubbed Camp Indulgence.

Many of Burgoyne’s troops, by now accustomed to their American lives, were granted a great deal of freedom, allowed passes to leave Camp Security at will, allowed to work for local farmers or in their own cottage industries, even allowed to move in with their families at Camp Indulgence. Troops of more recent capture were not given this kind of leeway, most notably those captured after the surrender of Cornwallis after his defeat at Yorktown. The surrender was signed on October 19, 1781, and Cornwallis’ men were dispatched up to Camp Security. They were closely guarded within the stockade confines.

One of Cornwallis’ troops got lucky. Well, kind of. Sergeant Roger Lamb, an Irishman who served with the Twenty-third Regiment of Welsh Fusiliers, made his own luck and his own misfortune by repeatedly escaping imprisonment and returning to the field where he would be imprisoned again. He covers almost all the bases of the prisoners assembled at Camp Security. He fought under Burgoyne and was first captured at Saratoga. He escaped before the Appalachian march and joined Major Andre’s forces. Then he fought under Cornwallis at Yorktown and was captured again and again he escaped. He reached Frederick, Maryland, where he was promptly captured and held in the Hessian Barracks prison. From there he moved to Winchester, Virginia, for a brief stay and then on to York.

His officers warned him he’d be put in jail in Winchester on account of his penchant for flight, and suggested he squirrel himself away in the hospital which would delay his move to York by a few weeks and keep him out of Revolutionary cross-hairs. When he finally reached Camp Security, his old comrades from the Ninth Regiment in Burgoyne’s army were ready for him. They had heard he was coming and so secured a pass for him from the American commander. They even built him a hut at Camp Indulgence. Thus Lamb, unlike the rest of Cornwallis’ troops and despite his mastery of the art of escape, got the same kid glove treatment granted the relatively settled Burgoyne prisoners.

Of course he tried to rouse them into escaping and rejoining the British forces in New York, but they’d been prisoners going on five years by the time Lamb arrived. They were treated well, had families and jobs. They just weren’t up for rejoining the fight. They did help Lamb escape this prison too, though. He and seven of Cornwallis’ men from the Twenty-third Regiment successfully fled in March of 1782 and joined Sir Guy Charlton’s troops in New York City.

The war was basically over by then. Yorktown was the last major battle and preliminary peace negotiations were already in the works in 1782. The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, formally ended the war. Lamb sailed for Portsmouth in December 1783. Upon his return he received his discharge and went back home to Dublin where he became a teacher and started a family. In 1809, he published An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences During the Late American War from Its Commencement to the Year 1783, a scholarly account of the War of Independence combined with his personal memoirs drawn from the journals he kept.

(Fun fact: Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, Goodbye to All That, The Golden Fleece and many other great books, was himself member of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He enlisted at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 and as an officer taught regimental history to his platoon. Roger Lamb’s escapes made the history books, and years later Robert Graves would write a fictionalized account of Lamb’s life, Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth.)

Lamb’s memoirs are an invaluable record of life at Camp Security, documenting the differences in temperament and condition between different troops. Now they have been enlisted to provide a whole new service to Camp Security. Photographic copies of Lamb’s original journal with notes and drawings of the prison camp will feature in a fundraising exhibit at the York County Heritage Trust sponsored by the Friends of Camp Security, a non-profit organization that has struggled for years to preserve the grounds of the camp from development.

The field that Camp Security was built on returned to farm and pasture after the war. Even as housing developments mushroomed up all around it, through the herculean efforts of historical preservation organizations and dedicated volunteers most of the land has remained unbuilt upon. It is the only Revolutionary War POW camp to survive in undeveloped condition. It has barely been excavated so there’s such a rich vein of history just waiting to be embraced.

Or destroyed. Developers have been buying, planning, pressing and suing to get their mitts on the property since 1979. Back then they were stopped by a quick archaeological survey that returned artifacts confirming it as the location of Camp Security. It’s been a constant struggle for the past 30 years to keep the wolf from the door. In 2005 Camp Security even made the The National Trust for Historic Preservation List of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

The end could be in sight. Two years ago Springettsbury Township became the proud owner of a 115-acre parcel adjacent to the field, but the 47-acre Hunters Crossing Property which is the central Camp Security site was still owned by real estate developer Timothy Pasch. Last May Pasch sold the property to The Conservation Fund, a nonprofit preservation group, for $1.05 million. They got a bridge loan to pay for it, in the hope that the township and local organizations would be able to raise the sum in time to pay off the loan by deadline.

As of now, they’re still $600,000 short.

[Friends of Camp Security] had been hoping to raise $400,000, but it has only been able to raise about 10 percent of the goal, said president Carol Tanzola.

“I think what has happened is there was a lot of publicity when The Conservation Fund came in and bridged the loan,” she said. “People sat back and said, ‘Oh, it’s done. It’s saved.'”

But there are no guarantees. If the groups can’t raise the money, The Conservation Fund reserves the right to put the property back on the market, she said, “because they need their funding back.”

The deadline has been pushed back from May 8th to August 21st, but that’s a lot of money to raise in a few months. The exhibit of artifacts from Camp Security and Lamb’s beautiful manuscript pages are part of that effort.

You can donate online by clicking the “Donate” button on the FOCS website, or if you prefer to kick it old school, by printing off their form and mailing a check. Every bit counts. Remember what an incredible bonanza of artifacts was found at Camp Lawton, the Civil War POW camp that was spared from development by its prime location on the grounds of a government hatchery and state park? This is older and rarer. It would be a tragedy if we let the chance to save it for future generations slip through our fingers.

Matisse stolen in Sweden 26 years ago found in UK

Modern(ish), Museums

A Matisse painting stolen from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1987 was discovered by an art dealer in Essex just before Christmas 2012. The painting was brought to Charles Roberts by an 85-year-old Polish collector who wanted to sell it. As a proper responsible dealer, Roberts checked the Art Loss Register and found that it had been stolen and was missing for a quarter century.

He hasn’t been dealing art professionally very long and this was one of the first paintings he had the opportunity to sell. It would have been a major score for him to handle a million-dollar Matisse while just starting out, so it was a stone cold bummer to discover that it belonged to someone else.

“I didn’t anticipate hearing that it had been stolen. It came as quite a shock to find that out,” Roberts told AFP. “It would have been good all round, but unfortunately it wasn’t to be. As soon as I was informed of its status there was no question about doing anything but returning it.”

Good man. When experts confirmed the identity of the painting, the Art Loss Register’s executive director Christopher Marinello in London claimed the piece. It was a swift resolution. Recovery of stolen artifacts require not just authentication but extensive negotiation. Arranging the return can often take years of legal wrangling. In this case it took three weeks, and there was a Christmas holiday in the middle of that. The painting was put it in a safe at the ALR offices until it could be returned to its rightful owner.

The Stockholm modern art museum had owned the Le Jardin since it was gifted to them by Mrs, Nora Lundgren November 15th, 1977. Less than 10 years later, on May 11th, 1987, a burglar smashed through the front door using a sledgehammer and stole the 1920 work by the French artist. The museum’s alarm did go off, but by the time the security guards got there 10 minutes later, the thief and the painting were gone.

Several attempts were made at the time to extort the museum. The thief/thieves offered to return the painting for an exorbitant ransom, but Museum Director Lars Nittive refused to negotiate with terrorists, to coin a phrase. Nittive stated to the press that he thought the painting was too recognizable to be easily sold, that he wouldn’t cave to the burglars’ demands. He was right; the painting was too visible for sale on the open market. Instead it disappeared into the black one and the trail went cold for two decades.

Despite the two-decade cost, Marinello thinks Nittive did the right thing.

“I commend the Museum for not giving in to ransom demands a quarter century ago. Stolen artwork has no real value in the legitimate marketplace and will eventually resurface…it’s just a matter of waiting it out.”

During that long waiting period, somehow Le Jardin got to Poland where it was purchased by the collector who hoped to sell it through Charles Roberts. Marinello does not believe the collector had anything to do with the theft (I still think he’s ultrashady for having bought it without even checking the ALR database) as the piece likely went through numerous hands over the years. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know what happened to the painting during those decades. ALR officials notified the police but they didn’t appear interested in pursuing an old international burglary case.

The painting was returned to the Stockholm museum on January 22nd, 2013. The museum documented its return on their Instagram page. Scroll down to the first January 23rd picture, click it and then click through to January 26th to see them all in a little chronological slideshow. The pictures are small and have those stupid Instagram effects, but they’re not too obnoxious. It’s neat to see the painting go from inspection to crate to display.

Matisse was living in Nice in 1920. His work during this post-war period mainly focused on female nudes or odalisques in Orientalist garb. These are interiors, albeit bright, warm, colorful interiors that reflect the palette of southern France which so inspired artist before him. He also took advantage of his surroundings — “simpler venues which won’t stifle the spirit,” as he put it — to paint landscapes with the “silver clarity of light” he found in Nice. Le Jardin is a fine example of his relaxed, warm work from the early Nice period.