British Library releases 1 million images

The British Library has released more than one million high resolution images scanned from public domain books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries on their Flickr account. Scanned as part of a digitization collaboration with Microsoft that began in 2008, the images illustrate a vast range of topics from literary classics like Charles Dickens novels to anthropological studies, travel guides, histories, song collections, children’s books and ever so much more. Even those decorative swirls that separate chapters and fancy initial capitals made the cut.

Each image is tagged by author, date of publication and book title, so if opening one picture inspires you to see every other image in the book, say, just click the link at the bottom of the description and you’ll see them all. Another link at the bottom of the description will show you every image in the collection published that year. That’s just the beginning, though. Starting next year, the British Library will tap into crowd powder to add details, new classifications and, hopefully, research inspirations.

We plan to launch a crowdsourcing application at the beginning of next year, to help describe what the images portray. Our intention is to use this data to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole of the content. The data from this will be as openly licensed as is sensible (given the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always, will be under an open licence.

The manifests of images, with descriptions of the works that they were taken from, are available on github and are also released under a public-domain ‘licence’. This set of metadata being on github should indicate that we fully intend people to work with it, to adapt it, and to push back improvements that should help others work with this release.

There are very few datasets of this nature free for any use and by putting it online we hope to stimulate and support research concerning printed illustrations, maps and other material not currently studied. Given that the images are derived from just 65,000 volumes and that the library holds many millions of items.

Since the images are public domain, they can be used without conditions. At the very least it’s a huge free stock collection that I can envision coming in very handy for everyone from graphic designers to parents looking to make an extremely nerdy coloring book for their kids (or themselves; coloring is the best). The British Library wants to know how people are using the pictures and they’ve offered their enthusiastic collaboration with any project readers may devise. You can Email or tweet them with any questions or ideas.

Vasari’s Last Supper back together after 50 years

In 1546, the Florentine Murate Convent commissioned painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari to make a monumental painting of The Last Supper. The final panorama was more than 21 feet long and 8 feet tall, made out of five poplar wood panels. Despite its unwieldiness, the painting has lived a peripatetic existence, moving around to various locations until in the early 19th century it settled in Florence’s Basilica of Santa Croce. It was there that it met its greatest foe: the great flood of 1966.

Just a few blocks from the banks of the Arno and at a lower elevation than much of the rest of the city, Santa Croce was hit first and hit hardest by the flood. The high point of the flood, more than 22 feet, was in the Santa Croce area. Water flooded the church’s cloister, the crypt and the Museo dell’ Opera in the refectory. In addition to the Vasari Last Supper, the museum held one of the great masterpieces of 13th century art, the Crucifix by Cimabue, one of only three surviving crucifixes by the artist whose break from the stylized conventions of Italo-Byzantine design was a major influence on the Renaissance humanists that would follow him. It was flooded to Christ’s halo.

Santa Croce remained under water for more than 12 hours, longer than anywhere else, saturating wood panel paintings like the Cimabue and Vasari’s Last Supper. Things only got worse when the waters receded. The muddy water, thick with debris, diesel oil, naphtha and sewage, dragged paint off the surface of art works (the Crucifix lost 60% of its paint; staff literally sifted through the water and mud to recover any fragment of the original paint they could) and coated it with scum. The wood under Vasari’s painting was the consistency of a sponge after its 12 hours underwater. The primer layer of gesso underlying the painted surface absorbed so much water that the paint lost adherence and began to peel and flake.

In order to dry The Last Supper as quickly as possible, museum staff had to separate the five panels making up the piece and coat the surface with rice paper to keep the paint attached. Even so, the wood contracted as it dried and the surface cracked in multiple places. It took restorers 10 years to put the Cimabue back together again. The Vasari was so devastated they didn’t even try. They stored it in a cool place with controlled humidity and just waited until the technology and funding made conservation possible.

It was a long wait. A 44 year wait, to be precise. In 2010, the Getty Foundation awarded a $400,000 grant to Florence’s prestigious restoration institute, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, to conserve The Last Supper and train a new generation of panel-painting conservators to replace the current generation who are due to retire within a decade. Unlike canvas painting restorers, panel work requires a detailed understanding of carpentry and the function of wooden supports. Two experts, Ciro Castelli and Mauro Parri, came out of retirement to work on this project. The former began working as a conservator a few months after the flood and he personally participated in the efforts to stabilize and conserve some of the most damaged paintings.

Seven conservators of varying experience have been learning from and collaborating with the old pros. Together they worked out a structural solution based on Vasari’s original innovative support structure. Because the cloistered sisters of the Murate Convent did not want Vasari and his assistants working among them for however long it would take them to finish the piece, Vasari was compelled to make the panels portable and joinable. One of his unusual cross-supports is still in place. This served as a model for the conservation team who were able to stabilize the panels and rejoin them for the first time in almost 50 years.

The team also focused on removing the rice paper covering the surface and cleaning the disgusting flood detritus from the paint. They found much to their delight that most of the original paint had survived. The estimated paint loss is 20-30%, which while horrendous is nowhere near as bad as they feared it would be. Conservators even found a previously unknown inscription noting an earlier restoration, like much earlier, like 1594, less than 50 years after The Last Supper was painted.

Superintendent of the OPD Marco Ciatti:

“The Vasari painting was the last major work damaged in the Florence flood to undergo treatment, and the conservation challenges were so complex that we only recently had the technology to begin treatment. When you consider the condition of the panels when treatment started, the current state of the Last Supper—visible again as a single, monumental artwork—is truly miraculous.”

Now that the surface has been stabilized, the flaking paint re-adhered, next on the agenda is restoration of the paint. That’s expected to take at least another two years, at the end of which Vasari’s The Last Supper will go back on display, hopefully in time for the 50th anniversary of the flood that almost destroyed it.

Happy belated Sigillaria!

This is going to be a shamelessly short entry due to the yearly flurry of present and nog-related activities. Thankfully, the University of Reading has done all the work for me. Classics professor Dr. Matthew Nicholls, developer of Virtual Rome, a digital model of the ancient city, has compiled a neat rundown of the ancient sources on the Roman festival of Sigillaria. Held on December 23rd, Sigillaria was the culmination of a week of Saturnalia celebrations, a day of gift-giving and quaffing the questionable wine combinations that Romans were so fond of.

Quality of presents varied enormously. The traditional present for the Saturnalia was some nuts – not unlike old fashioned handful of walnuts in a Christmas stocking. Martial mentions ‘gifts given and received’ some of which sound rather familiar.

“Fish-sauce, jars of honey, bottles of wine, toothpicks, a pencil case, perfume, a flask encased in wicker-work and clothing – even an item that sounds like an ugly but warm Christmas sweater…a ‘shaggy nursling of a weaver on the Seine, a barbarian garment … a thing uncouth but not to be despised in cold December … that searching cold may not pass into your limbs … you will laugh at rain and winds, clothed in this gift’.

Uncouth compared to a toga, perhaps, but surely no worse than a tunic, albeit a fuzzy one. Besides, if it comes from the a weaver on the banks of the Seine, that makes it couture by default. Anyway it’s the thought that counts, right? Right!

“It’s warming to hear that the festive spirit was alive 2000 years ago. Martial tells us that the quality of a friendship can’t be measured by the value of the gifts, and even tells recipients of his cheap presents that he’s been ‘mean’ to save them the expense of buying something expensive in return (Ep. 5.59: ‘people who give much, want to receive much in return’). Simple presents were a token of friendship.

In Epigrams Book 13 and Book 14, Martial makes long lists of what presents to give during the winter festival. The range is vast, from knives to hatchets to nuts to toothpicks to letter-writing parchment to a golden hair pin to pomatum, a hair pomade (spot the etymology) the Germans used to redden their barbarous locks. That’s not the only hair dye on the list either. There are plenty of items Martial would have given his friends that we give today.

Then there’s all the food. Did you put barley water and large-headed leeks under your tree for the kiddies this year? If you did, I hope you survive to tell the tale.

Happy belated Sigillaria, all!

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Thousand-year-old trepanned skulls of the Andes

UC Santa Barbara archaeologists excavating the south-central Andean province of Andahuaylas, Peru, have unearthed the remains of 32 people whose skulls bear the tell-tale signs of 45 different trepanations. Nine out of the 32 had more than one hole drilled or cut into their skulls. The burials date to the Late Intermediate Period (ca. 1,000-1,250 A.D.), a time of great upheaval following the collapse of the Wari Empire.

“For about 400 years, from 600 to 1000 AD, the area where I work — the Andahuaylas — was living as a prosperous province within an enigmatic empire known as the Wari,” [UC Santa Barbara bioarchaeologist Danielle Kurin] said. “For reasons still unknown, the empire suddenly collapsed.” And the collapse of civilization, she noted, brings a lot of problems.

“But it is precisely during times of collapse that we see people’s resilience and moxie coming to the fore,” Kurin continued. “In the same way that new types of bullet wounds from the Civil War resulted in the development of better glass eyes, the same way IED’s are propelling research in prosthetics in the military today, so, too, did these people in Peru employ trepanation to cope with new challenges like violence, disease and depravation 1,000 years ago.”

Earlier studies have found that trepanation was frequently used in response to blunt force wounds. One noted that holes were drilled over or next radiating fractures from trauma in 44% of cases, and that figure may be low because the trepanation could easily obscure the evidence of blunt force trauma if the damaged bone was all removed. It follows, therefore, that times of conflict would see an increase in cranial surgery simply because there are more wounds to be treated.

That’s not to say that there blunt trauma was the only condition trepanation was prescribed for. Any cranial affliction from an infection to swelling to a persistent headache could be dealt with via skull drilling surgery. Not everyone was a candidate, however. There was a cultural taboo in the Andahuaylas against trepanning the skulls of women and children. Out of the 32 skulls found, 25 of them are male and only three female (there are four adults whose gender could not be established.)

The skulls Kurin’s team found displayed a variety of different trepanation techniques: scraping, cutting and hand drilling. In some cases they were administered post-mortem and are clearly experiments just like cadaver studies in med schools today.

“As bioarchaeologists, we can tell that they’re experimenting on recently dead bodies because we can measure the location and depths of the holes they’re drilling,” [Kurin] continued. “In one example, each hole is drilled a little deeper than the last. So you can imagine a guy in his prehistoric Peruvian medical school practicing with his hand drill to know how many times he needs to turn it to nimbly and accurately penetrate the thickness of a skull.”

It’s a fascinating picture:

The top inset photograph is of the side of the skull where a previous trepanation had been successful enough to allow bone regrowth. So this fellow had it done, it worked for at least a time, then when he died he left his body to science (or science just took it) and became a drill depth tester.

A mummified skull provided a glimpse into the treatment. It has a scraped trepanation on the posterior right parietal bone that was in the process of healing at the time of death. This area has no long hair, unlike the rest of the scalp, and under a microscope it looks cleanly cut. The fellow shaved or was shaved to keep the wound site clean and free of infection. He also has a small second hole, this one bored into the bone, on his forehead. It’s in an area associated with migraine pain, just the kind of thing you might to drill a hole in your skull to treat. There is no post-surgical bone growth, so either the patient did not survive the surgery or he too was a port-mortem experiment. There are, however, the remains of a dark substance over the bore hole, a thick sludge with a finger print embedded in it. Archaeologists believe it may be the leftovers of an herbal poultice.

The group of skulls has already proven a treasure trove of information, and will likely yield more in the years to come. It is the largest well-contextualized collection of trepanned skulls in the world. There are plenty of holey crania in museums and institutions, but they were gathered a century ago under conditions that would make any archaeologist today shudder. There is little information about the sites where they were discovered and all-important contextual issues weren’t investigated or recorded.

But thanks to Kurin’s careful archaeological excavation of intact tombs and methodical analysis of the human skeletons and mummies buried therein, she knows exactly where, when and how the remains she found were buried, as well as who and what was buried with them. She used radiocarbon dating and insect casings to determine how long the bodies were left out before they skeletonized or were mummified, and multi-isotopic testing to reconstruct what they ate and where they were born. “That gives us a lot more information,” she said.

“These ancient people can’t speak to us directly, but they do give us information that allows us to reconstruct some aspect of their lives and their deaths and even what happened after they died,” she continued. “Importantly, we shouldn’t look at a state of collapse as the beginning of a ‘dark age,’ but rather view it as an era that breeds resilience and foments stunning innovation within the population.”

Terrifying new facial reconstruction of Robespierre

Philippe Charlier, forensic pathologist and indefatigable researcher of historical medical conundrums, and Philippe Froesch, facial reconstruction specialist with Visual Forensic in Barcelona, Spain, have created an intense facial reconstruction of French Revolutionary leader Maximilien de Robespierre. The main source for the image is a plaster copy of a death mask Madame Tussaud claimed* to have made from his decapitated head after he was guillotined on July 28th, 1794.

Froesch used a hand-held scanner to create a 3D computer model of the face. He then added details to the smooth-faced model, like the more than 100 pockmarks caused by a bad case of smallpox he suffered 30 years before his death when he was a boy of six. The eyes were a particular challenge because the closed eyelids didn’t leave an impression in the plaster so they were drawn on. Using an FBI technique that allowed him to calculate the eye size and position from marks left on the mask by the corneas, he was able to correct the crude eyelid line. (There are some pictures of the eye work on the Visual Forensic website.)

The end result is very far from the mild face conveyed in his portraits:

Portrait artists were then and are now notoriously heavy-handed with the painterly Photoshop, and the uncertainties of the French Revolution would have made it a very bad idea to cross someone who could easily have you decapitated, but damn yo, if this reconstruction is the real deal, I hope Robespierre paid those painters generously.

Charlier and Froesch also studied contemporary accounts of Robespierre and those coupled with the newly reconstructed face, suggested a possible diagnosis for the illness known to have afflicted him.

Several clinical signs were described by contemporary witnesses: vision problems, nose bleeds (“he covered his pillow of fresh blood each night”), jaundice (“yellow coloured skin and eyes”), asthenia (“continuous tiredness”), recurrent leg ulcers, and frequent facial skin disease associated with scars of a previous smallpox infection. He also had permanent eye and mouth twitching. The symptoms worsened between 1790 and 1794. […]

The retrospective diagnosis that includes all these symptoms is diffuse sarcoidosis with ophthalmic, upper-respiratory-tract (nose or sinus mucosa), and liver or pancreas involvement.

Sarcoidosis is a rare autoimmune syndrome where granulomas (collections of immune system cells) develop in any number of organs. Symptoms include all the ones mentioned above and a slew of others. The skin can be affected too, causing nodules or lesions that last several weeks. Treatment these days is corticosteroids, but Robespierre died 80 years before the disease was identified by Sir Jonathan Hutchinson and 160 years before the introduction of prednisone. His treatment would have been more along the lines of bleeding and dietary changes.

The reconstruction has not gone over well with Robespierre fans, for some reason.

When the first 3D images emerged earlier this month, far left politicians denounced it as a plot to make their hero look evil.

“These days, with 3D, heroes are derided and tyrant kings are magnified … A sad era,” wrote Alexis Corbiere, a Paris official and member of the Leftist Front, which is among many to view Robespierre as a champion of social justice.

*Some historians think Madame Toussaud lied about the authenticity of the mask to promote her work, that the Revolutionary authorities would have had no interest in preserving Robespierre’s visage and would want to bury him and the rest of the daily pile of bodies as soon as possible. However, the Terror leaders did commission her to make death masks of King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette and many other notable victims of Madame Guillotine. There’s no reason to assume they’d be inimical to the very idea of preserving the faces of whoever they deemed enemies of the Revolution. Masks of aristocrats and Terror victims were paraded through the streets.

The original of the mask is in Madame Tussauds London. The copies Froesch used are from the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. They were commissioned by artist and phrenologist Pierre Marie Alexandre Dumoutier who amassed a large collection of casts as part of his fascination with the bumps on people’s heads.