Month: December 2013

Riace Bronzes back on display after four years

Ancient, Modern(ish), Museums

The Riace Bronzes, the pristine pair of 5th century B.C. Greek bronze warriors discovered off the coast of Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, in 1972, have gone back on public display after an involuntary hiatus of four years. At 4:30 PM Italian time, Culture Minister Massimo Bray officially opened the doors of the Palazzo Piacentini, home of the National Museum of Reggio Calabria, allowing the invited guests to view the splendid Bronzes, vertical again for the first time since 2009. The doors will open to the general public tomorrow.

The museum building was designed in the late 1930s by Fascist favorite architect Marcello Piacentini and was in fairly good condition but needed extensive renovations to expand and modernize the space and update the facilities and technology. The Bronzes are world-class artifacts, unique and famous all over the globe. A lot of work was necessary to make the Palazzo Piacentini suitable for the crowds of people who would visit the statues if they could. It was also in desperate need of anti-seismic retrofits to ensure the safety of its precious contents in a city that has been virtually leveled by earthquakes at least a half-dozen times since antiquity.

To make way for the refurbishment, in 2009 the Riace Bronzes were removed from their bases and gingerly transported to the nearby Palazzo Campanella (see the video in this entry for footage of the painstaking transportation process), seat of the Regional Council of Calabria, where they were placed on their backs in a climate-controlled glassed-in space. There experts were able to take advantage of the opportunity to study, test and conserve the statues. That opportunity was only supposed to be two years long, but budgetary problems and a million other delays got in the way of the museum’s renovation. While Palazzo Piacentini continued to be indisposed, the Bronzes, Reggio Calabria’s greatest tourist draw, were indisposed along with it.

In their newly renovated hall, the statues now stand on new anti-seismic pedestals which anchor the statues to the floor even as they allow them to move by balancing the floor the Bronzes stand on over four spheres of marble. A system of counterweights ensures the statues will be able to remain standing on their pedestals should an earthquake strike. A handsome Carrara marble casing surrounds the pedestal.

Their idealized musculature is set off to its best advantage by a new lighting system and the reopening of windows that had been bricked up years ago. A state-of-the-art climate control and air filtration system ensures that the many artifacts from Magna Graecia (Greater Greece, the collective term for Greece’s southern Italian colonies) on display in the museum and in particular the Riace Bronzes are kept free of contaminants and in proper climactic conditions.

Other changes to the museum building include the addition of a roof restaurant with a beautiful view of the Straits of Messina, a new great hall for temporary exhibitions, a conference hall, a library and an underground level for storage of artifacts. The internal courtyard just beyond the entrance doors has been topped with a glass roof over an airy steel structure (it’s the first tensegrity roof in Italy) to create a new lobby from which visitors can see the Bronzes in their dedicated hall in the distance. They’ll get to see them up close in all their glory at the end of the route through the museum.

The renovation isn’t quite finished yet. Work on the roof, the conference hall and some of the other new spaces continues. The complete museum is expected to be open for business in April of next year, but considering that this was all supposed to be finished in 2011 in time for the 150th anniversary celebrations of the unification of Italy, I’d take that date with a grain of salt. At least the Riace Bronzes and many of the other ancient treasures of the museum are back in public view where they belong. As recently as last month the talk was they wouldn’t be back until the new year at the earliest.

It’s all the more important that these masterpieces of Early Classical Greek art have a permanent, stable home because the odds of them traveling again are basically nil. They are so delicate, especially in the solder joints, that any movement at all is a major risk to their integrity. Both warriors have braces on their left arms, the ones bent at the elbow that probably once held spears, to relieve the stress on the joints. When the Bronzes were moved from the Palazzo Campanella two weeks ago, it took one hour to transport them less than a half a mile. Extrapolate that speed, and they would have to leave now to make it to Milan by 2015.

Not that Reggio would let them go even if they could. The region has hard a time of it lately, between the economy and the struggle against the pervasive ‘Ndrangheta organized crime syndicate (last fall the entire Reggio city council was dismissed for suspicion of ‘Ndrangheta infiltration), and the return of the Riace Bronzes is seen as a rebirth of Reggio and of Calabria as a whole, a fresh start with a focus on the regions rich cultural patrimony bringing in much-needed tourist revenue.

Stone armor pit at Terracotta Army tomb excavated

Ancient

The mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shi Huang (reigned 247 B.C. – 220 B.C.) is famous for the vast Terracotta Army interred with him to protect him in the afterlife. Only a fraction of the warrior pits have been excavated. There are an estimated 8,000 warriors and horses in the three main pits. Two thousand have been unearthed, and just over half of them are in good enough condition to be on display. The Terracotta Warriors aren’t even in the main tomb. They’re a garrison just under a mile (1.5 kilometers) east of the emperor’s tomb, which is a mound 250 feet high.

The emperor’s tomb is at the center of the underground palace necropolis. While the imperial burial itself remains largely unexcavated, archaeologists have dug around it and found chariots, horses, terracotta court officials, terracotta acrobats, musicians, strongmen, bronze birds, the remains of real sacrificed horses served by terracotta grooms, mass graves of some of the estimated 700,000 workmen who labored 38 years in the construction of the necropolis complex.

In 1998, Chinese archaeologists unearthed a burial chamber to the southeast of the tomb mound. There they excavated more than 80 sets of ceremonial armor made out of limestone plates, forty helmets and horse armor. The armor was made out of limestone plates, more than 600 individual plates per set, which were connected by bronze wires that gave the plate enough flexibility to allow theoretical movement. This was not actual usable armor, however. They’re stone copies of the two kinds of armor that were used: the leather armor with rectangular plates of the common soldier and the iron fish-scale armor of the generals.

The artisans who created the stone armor painstakingly created each individual plate by hand, using sandstone to grind them to a consistent thickness of .3 centimeters. They perforated the plates repeatedly so that the bronze wires could be threaded through. This was a significant technical challenge, because the thin limestone plates are easily cracked. Archaeologists believe the stone was kept constantly wet while craftsmen drilled the holes with an iron spiral hand drill. There are six to 14 holes on each plate. When they experimented with replica materials, archaeologists found it took about three minutes to drill one hole. That means in drilling time alone, the plates for a single set of armor would have taken 350 work hours to complete.

The armor in the pit is in multiple layers, some containing relatively complete sets still connected, some with a jumble of strewn plates, some in good condition, some burned, possibly by the dastardly Xiang Yu. Archaeologists weren’t able to remove the armor plates that were still connected with the bronze wire, so, tragically, they cut the wires, pulled them out and then recovered the individual plates. Obviously this was very far from ideal, what with the destruction of priceless historical material, so researchers went back to the drawing board to figure out some way to remove the armor while still intact.

Experiments with cyclododecane (CDD), a consolidant compound that is liquid at around 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees C) and forms a wax-like coating when it solidifies. At ambient temperatures, it steadily sublimes until it’s gone. After years of trials, in 2004, CDD-impregnated cotton gauze was applied to a section of armor. It worked like a charm, essentially gluing the armor together. The section was encased in cardboard frame reinforced with wood. The frame was filled with polyurethane foam and straps were embedded in it. Once the poly foam had fully hardened, archaeologists pulled on the straps and the whole thing came out cleanly. No pieces were lost or damaged. The bottom of the plates and wires were cleaned, then the poly and CDD removed and the top cleaned.

The test was so successful that in 2005 a complete set of armor was removed from the pit. It was restored and put on display in the Qin Shi Huang Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum at the mausoleum site and on the road.

Meanwhile, back at the pit, an estimated 6,000 more sets of armor slumbered in their thick layers. Now excavations have begun again and there is fantastic footage of the crazy puzzle of armor in the pit. I can’t embed it, but you can see the excavation in this CNTV video.

Nobody bought the Tiffany Bat Lamp

Modern(ish)

Granted, it was prohibitively expensive for most of the world with a pre-sale estimate of $550,000 – 750,000, but it’s so rare and so wonderful that I expected Tiffany Studios’ Bat Table Lamp to be snapped up right quick by one the many deep-pocketed buyers that frequent Sotheby’s auctions. They were certainly on hand, since someone shelled out $1,565,000 for the iconic Wisteria Table Lamp which was estimated to sell in the same range ($600,000 — 800,000) as the Bat.

No disrespect to the Wisteria, but nobody puts the Bat Table Lamp in a corner. Behold its genius:

The Bat lamp, like its cousin the Dragonfly Table Lamp, was a departure from the floral patterns that had dominated the glassworks since its inception in 1893. Louis Comfort Tiffany was inspired to start the Queens factory after being “overwhelmed” by Emile Gallé’s pioneering Art Nouveau glass at the 1889 Paris Exposition. Gallé, who would make several wonderful bat-themed pieces including a lamp that pre-dates Tiffany’s, focused on natural motifs with an emphasis on flowerforms and so did Louis’ new glass company.

It was the influence of Japanese and Chinese art that brought the bat into the picture. Instead of being symbols of death and night, the Bram Stoker bat, if you will, in Asian art bats represent long life and good fortune. Japonisme, as the trend was called in France, inspired Art Nouveau designers from architecture to jewelry to wallpaper, and bats started to crop up more and more the last decade of the 19th and first decade of the 20th century.

Tiffany Studios’ introduction of a “Bat” lamp after 1902 is timely within this historical context. Although still unusual, the bat motif had gained prominence and was stylish. Moreover, its use on lamps was particularly appropriate since, after all, lamps are used at night, the temporal realm of bats. The decoration expresses the object’s function, but in a poetic and charming way.

Tiffany first explored the bat in a vase that he exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Like he would later with the Bat Table Lamp, he set the flying mammals against a starry night sky. When he took the theme to leaded glass, the background became darker, a rich midnight sky with blue and yellow stars against which the contrasting oranges and browns of the articulated bats glow.

Created around 1905, on the Tiffany Studios 1906 Price List the Bat lamp was priced at $125. In a time when the average wage was 22 cents an hour, this was a high luxury item. The glass mosaic inlay you can see above the bats on the base was particularly costly and time-consuming to produce. Just to give you some comparisons, the Wisteria lamp, made out of 2,000 pieces of individually cut glass, was listed on the 1906 Price List at $400. The Cobweb Table Lamp was even more expensive, listed in 1906 for $500. One example sold at auction last year for $3,250,000. They were all three popular in their day — Wisteria most of all — but today there are only seven known Cobwebs extant and five Bats.

The Bat Table Lamp was discontinued in 1910 when Tiffany Studios stopped producing mosaic inlay models because of how expensive and labor-intensive they were to make.

Holocaust Museum digitizes Rosenberg Diary

Modern(ish)

The diary of Nazi Party leader, racist philosopher and close Hitler confidant Alfred Rosenberg was officially handed over to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on Tuesday. Museum staff must have had access to the diary before then, because the entire 400 pages plus of loose-leaf paper have been digitized and uploaded to the web. Each page is scanned in readably high resolution and accompanied by a transcript.

“The Museum encourages people to think about why the Holocaust happened and how it was possible in such an advanced society,” said United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield. “The Rosenberg diary will add to our understanding of the ideas that animated the extremist ideology of Nazism. We are grateful to our partners at ICE who helped us secure this important piece of history, a significant addition in our urgent efforts to rescue the evidence of the Holocaust.”

Alfred Rosenberg played a key role in the development of Nazi anti-semitic policy, both philosophically and practically. In 1930, he wrote The Myth of the Twentieth Century, an impenetrable tome nobody read about the noble Aryan struggle against the insidious Jew, liberal and Bolshevik. He was instrumental in promoting the theory of Lebensraum and as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories organized the deportations of Eastern European Jews to concentration camps. As head of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce), he was also directly responsible for the orgy of looting of art and antiquities from occupied territories.

He was captured by Allied forces in May of 1945. His papers, including the diary, were confiscated in August and used as evidence against him at the Nuremburg Trials. He was tried for conspiracy to commit aggressive warfare, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity and convicted on all counts. Alfred Rosenberg was hanged on October 16th, 1946.

After that, the diary and many other papers disappeared, probably taken by Dr. Robert Kempner, a German-Jewish lawyer who had fled Germany in 1939 and returned after the war to serve as deputy chief counsel at the Nuremberg Trials. When he went back home to the United States after the trials, he brought a great number of unclassified documents with him, including apparently the Rosenberg diary. Kempner practiced law, focusing mainly on Nazi restitution cases, and published his own personal research, including several papers that quoted parts of the Rosenberg diary nobody else had ever seen.

After Kempner’s 1993 death, his heirs decide to donate many of the documents. A 1997 inventory of the Kempner papers did not find the diary. The museum continued to search for it for years, until in November of 2012 they discovered the information that would break the case. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) found the long-lost diary in April of this year at the home of an individual in home in Lewiston, north of Buffalo, New York. Authorities have still not announced who that individual was, but one possibility is Robert Kempner’s former secretary.

Because of their checkered trajectory, the Rosenberg diary pages have been separated. The ones at the Holocaust Museum are the bulk of the diary, covering years 1936 through 1944. Earlier entries from 1934 to 1935 are part of the collection of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Medieval mummies protected by wall inscriptions in Sudan

Medieval

The archaeological site of Old Dongola in what is today Sudan has a rich history. Originally built as a fortress in the fifth century, Dongola grew into a prosperous town thanks to its Nile-side location and, after its conversion to Christianity by the end of the sixth century, became the capital of the Coptic Christian kingdom of Makuria. In the seventh century, Makuria was able to defeat the forces of the Rashidun Caliphate after its successful invasion of Egypt. The ensuing peace treaty established trade relationships between Muslim Egypt and Christian Nubia that lasted for 600 years, a long period of stability that allowed the Kingdom of Makuria to flourish. The kingdom’s power began to wane in the 12th century and it was finally defeated by the Sultan of Egypt in the 14th century.

In 1993, the Polish Archaeological Mission (PAM) discovered three burial crypts in the northwest annex of a monastery in Old Dongola. Archaeologists believe they were part of a commemorative complex built either at the direction of or for the burial of Archbishop Georgios, Dongola’s primary cleric who was appointed directly by the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria rather than via a national church hierarchy. According to a funerary stele found in the annex near the crypts, the archbishop died in 1113 A.D. when he was 82 years old.

Inside each chamber were several natural mummies, some wrapped in textiles, and the walls of the southernmost crypt were covered with inscriptions written in Greek and Sahidic Coptic. The crypts were photographed and then resealed to preserve the contents until a more thorough excavation could be done. That finally happened in 2009.

They found that the southern crypt (crypt 1) held seven mummies, one of which is thought to be the body of Archbishop Georgios. Archaeologists were not able to single out which of the bodies, if any, was the Archbishop’s. They are all adult males older than 40 and, judging from the extensive evidence of chronic and degenerative illnesses, probably older than that at the time of death. The bodies were dressed fairly modestly, mainly in linen garments, wrapped in shrouds and then interred in the crypt over a course of years. Four pectoral crosses were found in the crypt as well, two of them wood, one of them stone, one of them glass.

The inscriptions on the walls of crypt 1 provide a particularly fascinating glimpse into Makuria’s unique religious culture. Painted in black ink over a thin layer of whitewash, they cover the four walls of the barrel chamber almost entirely. They are in very good condition, except for areas where the walls themselves were damaged. The writing was all done by the same person, one Ioannes, who did us the favor of signing his name at the end of the inscriptions on the north, east and south walls. He probably signed the west wall too, but it was lost due to damage.

Ioannes was better at Coptic than he was at Greek. There are copious errors in the Greek, some of which he covered with whitewash and redid, like Medieval white-out, which suggests he may have been trying to copy a text, which suggests he had access to a library, either in the monastery or perhaps the private library of the archbishop. It’s a reversal of what you might expect, since Greek was still going great guns in the Eastern Church while Sahidic Coptic was already a dying language by the end of the 11th century.

The inscriptions begin on the west wall with an invocation of the Holy Trinity. Underneath that the writings are defined as a phylakterion malakias, a phylactery or amulet against weakness. A series of magical symbols in a frame follow, and beneath them are two lists, one of numerical cryptograms representing the names of god and angels, the other of magical divine names. Quotations from the gospels and prayers in Greek are next. One of the prayers, said to by the Virgin Mary, is well-known in a languages from Coptic to Arabic, but this is the first time it’s ever been found in Greek. Since Greek was probably its original language, it’s a highly significant find. The prayer ends abruptly with the invocation of a magical ritual meant to chase evil spirits from the tomb.

The inscription on the east wall quotes from the Gospel of Luke in Greek then moves on to a Coptic piece on the death of the Virgin Mary. It includes the prayer she spoke before she died and describes her final scene. This is an excerpt from a popular fourth century Coptic work by Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, but unlike every other extant version of the text known, the crypt inscription has a curious line: after Mary finishes praying, death appears to her “in the form of a rooster.”

From the paper on the inscriptions in the journal Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean by University of Warsaw professor Adam Łajtar:

The decoration of the burial vault may therefore be properly described as a silent ritual, intended to safeguard not only the tomb, but primarily those who were buried inside of it during the dangerous liminal period between the moment of dying and their appearance before the throne of God. The entire ensemble of texts and architecture must be considered a unique and important witness to the funerary beliefs and practices of Christian northeastern Africa in medieval times.