Fly in 1929 style aboard an original Ford Tri-Motor

Having revolutionized individual transportation and industrial production with his Model T car, after World War I Henry Ford turned his sights to airplanes. He had been interested in aviation from its early days, lending three automobile factory workers to his 15-year-old son Edsel to help build a monoplane powered by a Model T engine in 1909, just six years after the Wright Brothers’ seminal flight at Kitty Hawk. Edsel’s Model T monoplane never did fly well and its brief life ended when it crashed into a tree. During the war, Ford applied his production genius to aircraft engines. In the fall of 1917, the War Department commissioned 22,000 12-cylinder Liberty engines from all of Detroit’s automotive companies. Ford redesigned the process for cylinder production, streamlining it so production rose from 151 cylinders a day to more than 2,000. In the end, Ford produced all of the Liberty cylinders (433,826 in total) and 3,950 complete engines.

(Fun fact: Cadillac initially declined to build Liberty engines because General Motors co-founder William C. Durant was a pacifist. Henry M. Leland, creator of the Cadillac company who had sold it to GM in 1909 but stayed on the payroll as an executive, wanted in on the Liberty order, so he left General Motors and founded Lincoln solely to produce the airplane engines. It was only after the war that the Lincoln plant turned to automobile production, using a luxury V8 engine inspired by the design of the Liberty. Ford bought Lincoln in 1922, streamlined operations to make it profitable, muscled Leland out within months and to this day Ford Motor Company still produces luxury cars under the Lincoln imprint.)

It wasn’t until 1923 that Henry Ford dipped his toe into commercial aviation by investing in William Bushnell Stout’s Stout Metal Airplane Company. Henry and Edsel invested $1,000 each in Stout’s company which went on to produce the Stout 2-AT “Air Pullman,” the first all-metal single engine monoplane. That single engine, by the way, was a Liberty. In April of 1925, the Ford Air Transport Service, the first regularly scheduled commercial airline, went into operation carrying 1,000 pounds of freight aboard an Air Pullman between Detroit and Chicago. In August of 1925, Henry and Edsel purchased the Stout Metal Airplane Company outright and created the Stout Metal Airplane Division of the Ford Motor Company.

To get the word out and assure potential customers that air flight was a dependable means of transporting cargo, Ford launched the Ford National Reliability Air Tour with the Air Pullman as its featured player. The tour was effective and less than a year after that first cargo flight, Henry Ford and William Stout accompanied the first bag of air mail to be carried by a commercial flight from Detroit to Cleveland under escort of fighter planes.

While the 2-ATs went to work delivering mail, Stout went to work on a new model: the 3-AT trimotor, an all-metal craft with three engines (originally Liberties until they proved too heavy and were replaced with Wright J-4 engines) and a large passenger or cargo compartment. Ford thought the 3-AT was the future of aviation until he saw the test flights. They were abject failures and Henry barred Stout from the engineering room after that.

Sans Stout, the Stout division of Ford started over after a fire destroyed all their 2-ATs and the prototype 3-AT on January 16th, 1926. They updated the 3-AT design to create a trimotor that was actually able to maintain altitude and the Ford 4-AT Trimotor, aka the “Tin Goose,” was born. Designed for passengers but with removable seats for cargo transport, the sturdy metal plane was an immediate success. It would become the first mass-produced passenger airplane with a total of 199 manufactured between 1925 and 1933. In 1927, Pan American used Trimotors for its first international flights from Key West to Havana, Cuba. Transcontinental Air Transport, with routes and airports designed by Charles Lindbergh, used Ford Trimotors to carry passengers coast to coast (albeit with train legs in between) in 1929. The next year it merged with Western Air Express to create TWA. Franklin Delano Roosevelt flew a Trimotor during his 1932 presidential campaign, replacing the traditional train whistle stop tour.

Its heyday was brief as new technology superseded the Trimotor by 1933, but the plane still flew for decades. Trimotors were used as sightseeing planes, barnstormers, crop dusters and to carry freight to remote mining operations far from city airports. One particularly heroic Trimotor transported 50 people a day off the island during the 1942 Battle of Bataan until Japanese fighters shot it out of the sky.

There are 18 Trimotors still in existence today, eight of which are airworthy. One of them, a 4-AT-E model built in 1929 for Eastern Air Transport, is owned by the Experimental Aircraft Association out of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which spent 12 years putting it back together after the plane was lifted up by a gust of wind and slammed into the runway. That model is now touring the country giving nine people at a time the full 1929 experience in its restored cabin.

This weekend it’s in Waco, Texas, at the McGregor Executive Airport.

You can’t book online anymore for this weekend’s rides, but you can still get walk-up tickets, $75 for adults, $50 for children 17 and under. The plane will be in St. Simons Island, Georgia, next weekend and Savannah, GA, the weekend after that. The final flights of the year will take place the weekend of November 14th in Jacksonville, Florida.

Intact Wari mummies found in Lima temple

Two intact mummy bundles from the pre-Incan Wari civilization have been discovered inside the walls of the adobe and clay brick temple of Huaca Pucllana. Seventy burials have been found since intensive excavations began in 2005, but most of them are not intact. They’ve been damaged by deliberate human interference or simply the passage of time. The first intact burial found dates was a young woman with an exceptional death mask buried around 700 A.D. and unearthed in 2008. Two years later another female mummy buried around 850 A.D. with two infants and a young child was found undisturbed. Now three years after that a third intact burial has been found which early estimates date to around 1000 years old.

The two mummies are of different sizes, one is much larger the other and is probably an adult while the smaller one is the mummy of a child. The adult was a member of the elite, a high-ranking official or priest, and the little one may have been a child sacrificed in his or her honor, possibly even buried alive. Alternatively the child may be a relative who died at the same time. Both are wrapped snugly in woven rope bundles. The mummies are still in situ. They will be taken to a Ministry of Culture lab for testing to determine their age and sex. The full array of tests should take about six months, after which we’ll know what diseases they may have had, what they ate, the kind of work they did, and if DNA collaborates, whether the two are related.

Nestled in the cavity along with the mummies, archaeologists also found seven vessels used to drink mate, 12 textile bags and the skeletal remains of three guinea pigs. The burial site was carved out of a wall on the sixth platform of the pyramid, one of the most thoroughly looted areas of the Huaca Pucllana complex. Destruction began long before the arrival of the Spanish, which makes the human remains and artifacts particularly rare survivals and this tomb one of the most important discoveries made at the site.

The pyramid long predates the Wari. The Huaca Pucllana complex was a ceremonial and administrative center built by the Lima culture between 200 and 650 A.D. in what is today the tony neighborhood of Miraflores. The Lima used a construction system known as the “bookshelf” style wherein hundreds of thousands of clay bricks are stacked together like books on shelves. Over time they lean in towards each other at opposite angles, like books on a shelf that isn’t completely full. This made the pyramids highly resistant to earthquakes.

When the Wari spread out from their capital of Ayacucho (about 200 miles southeast of Lima in the Andes) and reached Lima around 650 A.D., they put their own imperialist stamp on the previous culture’s monuments: they buried their elite inside the walls of the pyramids. It was a means to assert their dominance over the Lima culture and to give their important dead impressive eternal resting places.

All the archaeological excavations, research and maintenance of Huaca Pucllana is funded by revenues from the site’s museum and restaurant. Last year, 60,000 visitors went to see the temple; the number is expected to rise to 100,000 this year. The museum is innovative in its exhibits as well, including a room designed for the visually impaired with replicas of ancient artifacts visitors can touch and Braille descriptions. If you’re ever in Lima, Huaca Pucllana is not to be missed.

Bust of Gaius Caesar going home to Italy

A rare bust of Gaius Caesar, grandson, adopted son and heir of Augustus Caesar, is headed back home. It sold at a Bonhams London auction yesterday for £374,500 ($604,758) including buyer’s premium, more than double its pre-sale estimate, to an Italian buyer which means it will be going home for the first time in at least decades.

There’s no telling how long it’s been gone. Its first documented appearance was in art market in Los Angeles in the 1990s. We know it wasn’t recently excavated because there are Italian restorations from the 18th and 19th centuries and it’s mounted on a plinth from around the same time. It could very well have been illegally exported, mind you, like so many of its comrades, but there have been no attempts to block the sale, something the Italian government is not at all reluctant to do these days when they suspect a lot was removed from the country in contravention of cultural patrimony laws.

So there’s very little known history about the bust itself except what can be deduced from its features. Gaius is portrayed in idealized beauty — he seriously looks like a movie star — with long curly sideburns and a short beard just covering his chin.

It’s that facial hair which makes the piece so unusual. Portraits of Gaius Caesar have been classified into five types; this bearded look is the fifth and rarest. The facial hair is thought to be an iconographic allusion to Mars, the god of war, and the bust created in honor of Gaius’ military victory either Arabia in 1 A.D. or in Artagira, Armenia, in 3 A.D. The latter victory turned out to be a Pyrrhic one for Gaius himself since he was wounded in the battle and that wound would claim his life five months later when he was just 23 years old. (If Tacitus is right, Augustus’ formidable wife Livia saw to it that the wound became fatal so that Augustus would have to make her son Tiberius his heir.)

There’s been debate in the scholarship over whether Type Fives even are Gaius. Some historians believe they’re early portraits of Augustus Caesar when he was still Octavian and that the beard was worn in mourning for the death of Julius Caesar, his great-uncle and adopted father. It’s a difficult call to make because Gaius and his younger brother Lucius were both deliberately portrayed as looking like Augustus to provide a visual reinforcement that they were his heirs, destined to carry on his legacy of successful leadership. Bonhams ultimately sides with University of Southern California archaeologist John Pollini who argues in his 1987 book The Portraiture of Gaius and Lucius Caesar that the Type Five portraits are of Gaius, not Octavian.

Qing dynasty murals overpainted with garish cartoons

Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) murals on the walls of Yunjie Temple in Chaoyang, Liaoning Province, northeastern China, have been overpainted by the incompetents hired to do conservation work. The original murals were damaged, with chunks missing and faded colors, and the temple walls they adorned were in need of maintenance because they were constructed out of a cob-like combination of straw and earth. The contractors shored up the walls and just painted over everything, replacing the delicate and elegant original Buddhist scenes with brightly colored cartoons of Taoist myths.

The temple is best known for its very rare square pagoda with 13 levels of eaves built during the Liao Dynasty (916-1125) that towers over the modest Qing structures built at its base 270 years ago, but the frescoes adorning the walls of the Qing buildings while much more recent and not well-known are historical and beautiful in their own right. They were before the budget construction crew got their hands on them, at any rate.

Chaoyang is steeped in history. There are records of the city going back to the Han Dynasty in the 3rd century B.C., and its first temple, Longxiang, built in the 4th century A.D., marks the birth of Buddhism in northeastern China. The area is also famous for producing exceptional dinosaur fossils. You’d think, given all this, that historical sites in Chaoyang would be closely regulated, but of course regulations mean nothing if they’re not enforced by the authorities.

This debacle wouldn’t even be known today if it weren’t for Chinese blogger Wujiaofeng. He had visited the temple in 2011 to see the pagoda and was surprised to find handsome Qing frescoes he hadn’t known were there. When he returned a few weeks ago, he found the Qing buildings completely unrecognizable, marred by a hideous new paint job. He posted a blog entry about the devastation. The story went viral on Chinese internet sites and the subsequent outrage spurred an investigation by the municipal government.

According to Li Haifeng, deputy secretary-general of the government of Chaoyang, in May of this year the abbot of the temple applied to the Phoenix Mountain Scenic Area Management Office for a permit to restore the crumbling walls. The Office then applied to city’s cultural heritage authority which informed the scenic area people that because the temple was a listed historical monument, any restoration work had to be in compliance with national heritage law and thus required approval from the cultural heritage department of Liaoning Province which stipulated all interventions follow the proper conservation project management approach. Under this protocol, the restoration would only be done by experts qualified by the National Heritage Board to assess condition, design and execute the conservation project.

That last step never happened. The Phoenix Mountain Scenic Area Management Office never sought the approval of provincial heritage officials. Instead, the abbot just moved forward with the project, hiring a local company that was not qualified in ancient mural restoration. From the look of the final results, that company shouldn’t even be qualified in fence painting. Even if they had left the murals alone, that gloppy red paint coating the once-lovely wooden beams destroying their natural blackened patina would be crime enough.

In the wake of this disaster, the municipal government has fired two officials — the one in charge of temple affairs and the head of Chaoyang’s cultural heritage monitoring team — and given the Communist Party chief of the Phoenix Mountain Scenic Area Management Office a warning. The investigation is ongoing so more heads might roll before it’s over. To ensure the temple suffers no further mutilation, inspectors and police have been dispatched to the site. Cultural heritage experts from the regional government claim the murals can be restored to their original look, but it’s not clear to me what exactly that means. Are the originals even still underneath all that mess? Or do they mean the new ones can be removed and replaced with copies of the originals?

Anyway, a lot of the articles link this botched restoration to the Great Jesus Monkey of 2012, but I think that does Cecilia Giménez a disservice and gives way too much credit to the Chinese contractors. The original over which Monkey Jesus was painted was basically a throwaway copy of a copy of a copy done in two hours by a local artist. It bears little relation to the devotional Buddhist frescoes of Yunjie Temple.

One hour alone at night with Canaletto for €400

Picture it: midnight on the Grand Canal in Venice. The madding crowds and blanket of humidity that suffocate the daytime have dissipated, replaced by a cool breeze from the lagoon and streets quiet enough you can hear the echo of your footfalls as you step off the gondola and onto the Campo della Salute. The basilica of Santa Maria della Salute rises above you, the baroque whiteness of its cupola glowing in the penumbra just as it had for J.M.W. Turner 173 years ago.

You walk down the side of the great church. The street lights illuminate the great Gothic windows of the triple apse as you approach the Abbey of San Gregorio. You’ve made arrangements in advance. You didn’t want to show up with €50 and the dream that you might be the only one there. No, this date has been 270 years in coming and you want every last minute of your allotted hour to be spent alone with Canaletto. You were glad to spend €400 to buy all eight tickets available for your chosen hour so you could walk solitary down the monastery halls, look out the window he looked out of, stand in the room where his camera obscura perfectly captured the view, allowing him to depict the most minute architectural details of the church, the salt warehouses, the Doge’s palace.

On display in that very room, for the first time since Canaletto laid oil paint to canvas between 1740 and 1745, is the painting he made of that vista. You make good use of your precious hour alone, alternating between the painting — L’Entrata nel Canal Grande e la Basilica della Salute — and the view, marveling at how little has changed even though many of the boats are motorized now and there are two new bell towers. Was it worth it to spend an hour alone with Canaletto, his work and its subject in a 15th century monastery in the dead of night? The Pope remains Catholic and bears still relieve themselves in the woods.

At least that’s what the Fondaco Venezia, organizers of this unique exhibition, hope the reaction will be. Gero Qua Canaletto (“I Was Here Canaletto” in Venetian dialect) is intended to be an emotional experience, a rare chance to commune with the artist and his work where he painted it, to share an intimate connection between art, city and the magnificent austerity of the Medieval abbey. That’s why the exhibition will be open 24 hours a day from November 10th through December 27th, with only a maximum of eight people allowed in at one time.

From nine in the morning to nine at night, tickets will cost €35 ($47.86). From nine at night to nine in morning, tickets will cost €50 ($68.36). If you want that hour to yourself, call ahead to book all eight tickets. If you can stand to share Canaletto, just book a single. It’ll still be a small group and a unique experience, especially, I would imagine, at night. Hell, I’d pay just to roam the monastery. That’s got to be a most splendidly eerie place to be at the witching hour.

I doubt it’s coincidental that the dates of the show will include one of Venice’s greatest holidays (in the original “holy day” sense of the word). On November 21st, the city celebrates the Feast of the Madonna della Salute (the Madonna of Health), a prayerful pilgrimage to the basilica of Santa Maria della Salute to thank Mary for saving the city from the Bubonic plague that ravaged it in 1630 and 1631. A third of the city’s 150,000 residents died, including the Doge Nicolò Contarini and the Patriarch of Venice Giovanni Tiepolo.

Plague broke out in June of 1630. Despite quarantine procedures, by October the city was in dire circumstances. The ruling council organized a procession of constant prayers to the Virgin Mary that lasted three days and three nights. Doge Contarini pledged that he would build a magnificent church to Mary if she returned Venice to health, and that every year the senate, Doge and other dignitaries would process again to thank Mary for saving them. The intercession took a few months to kick in, and even after the plague peaked, it would still continue to kill until November 1631. The elderly Doge died from it on April 2nd, 1631.

His promise outlived him, though. Architect and sculptor Baldassare Longhena was commissioned to design the church in 1631. He worked on it until his death in 1682. It was finally completed five years later and the basilica was consecrated on November 21st, 1687. The yearly processions have taken place without fail ever since. To facilitate the movement of the crowds of pilgrims, an impromptu bridge is built from the opposite bank of the Grand Canal to the church steps. For centuries the bridge was made of gondolas crammed next to each other. Nowadays they build a slightly more stable floating pontoon bridge.

What a spectacular Feast it’s going to be this year, with Canaletto’s vision of the church ensconced right across from it.