Month: May 2015

Icon of the Madonna restored to former splendor

Medieval, Modern(ish)

The 13th century icon of the Madonna in the Basilica of Saints Boniface and Alexis on the Aventine Hill has been restored to glowing golden splendor. The restoration by experts at the Superior Institute for Conservation and Restoration (ISCR) took three years. The surface was cleaned, pollutants and paint from past retouchings removed.

This isn’t the first time the ISCR has worked on this icon. In 1951 it was restored by Cesare Brandi, ISCR founder and pioneer art restorer. The icon was in dangerously bad condition due to the decay of the wood panel on which it was originally painted. Brandi transferred the work to canvas and filled in areas of missing paint using a thin watercolor cross-hatching technique he had pioneered in the restoration of the frescoes in the church of Saint Mary of the Truth in Viterbo after they were reduced to rubble by an Allied bomb in 1944.

The next time the icon left the church was in 2012 for an exhibition of 14 of Rome’s medieval icons at the Palazzo Venezia. That’s where it became clear that Brandi’s retouchings had become problematic over the six decades. ISCR restorers removed paint from Brandi’s and previous interventions. The small gaps were then filled by being covered with tissue paper and painted with watercolor, the larger gaps by stucco and cross-hatch paintings. The technique Brandi used is still a staple of art restoration today; it’s the materials and analytic technology that have improved by leaps and bounds.

Cesare Brandi also restored other famous icons in Rome, including the Madonna of Ara Coeli, an 11th century tempera on wood panel which replaced a masterpiece by Raphael on the high altar of the church of Ara Coeli on the Capitoline Hill, and the Madonna of San Sisto, now at the monastery of Santa Maria del Rosario in the Monte Mario neighborhood, which dates to the 7th century and is the oldest icon in the city.

The Madonna di Sant’Alessio icon was painted by an unknown Roman artist in the mid-13th century in the style of the Advocate Madonna, an iconographic type emphasizing Mary’s intercessionary role on behalf of humanity that was very popular in medieval Rome. For a few centuries before and after the first millennium, the Advocate Madonna type, depicted without the Christ child, her right hand raised, her left against her chest, was considered the quintessential Roman Madonna.

The church, originally dedicated to Saint Boniface of Tarsus alone, was expanded to include Saint Alexius in the masthead by Sergius, the Greek metropolitan bishop of Damascus who had fled the advancing Islamic forces and settled in Rome in 977 A.D. According to his legend Alexius was born and raised to a wealthy senatorial family in 4th-5th century Rome, but the cult venerating him started in Syrian where the saint was said to have lived as a beggar after abandoning his youth of privilege and comfort. After a church sexton had a miraculous vision of the Madonna which pointed to him as a holy man, Alexius fled his newfound fame and returned to Rome where his parents, who did not recognize him, let him live in a cubby under the staircase out of Christian charity. It wasn’t until his death 17 years later that his autobiography was found clenched in his hand and he was finally recognized as their long-lost son.

Sergius brought the cult of Saint Alexius to Rome with him where it found fertile ground since Romans love a native son. The site of the church on the Aventine even garnered an apocryphal association with Saint Alexius: it was said to be the location where his father Euphemianus’ home stood, the stairs under which he had lived in humility and poverty incorporated into the walls of the church. While he’s still a saint in the Latin Church, his cult has faded. It’s in the Eastern Church, particularly in Russia, where Alexius is one of the most venerated saints, a frequent subject of poems and stories and the reason Alexei was such a popular name for Tsars.

The newly restored icon plays into the legend of Saint Alexius as well. In the sexton’s vision where Mary identified Alexius as true holy man, she spoke through her icon. According to this tale, Sergius brought the icon from the church in Edessa with him when he went to Rome.

Lost Reich Chancellery horses found in warehouse

Modern(ish)

Two monumental bronze equine sculptures by Josef Thorak that once guarded Hitler’s Reich Chancellery in Berlin have been found in a warehouse in the southwestern German spa town of Bad Durkheim. The raid was one of 10 executed at the same time around the country. Art squad police raided properties in Berlin, Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein as well as part of an extensive multi-year investigation of eight men suspected of being a ring of illegal art dealers.

The raids also recovered three massive granite reliefs by Arno Breker called Waechter (“Guardians”), Raecher (“Avengers”) and Kameraden (“Comrades”) that were meant to adorn the Reich Chancellery but were never installed, and two sculptures of women, Galatea and Olympia, by Fritz Klimsch that once adorned the garden behind the Reich Chancellery. Berlin police spokesman Michael Gassen says they confiscated 100 tons of art in the raids. Thorak’s Walking Horses alone are 16 feet high and 33 feet long and weigh two tons each.

These sculptures survived the war and the destruction of the Chancellery building because they were squirreled away for their protection. When Berlin became the target of ever more frequent bombings in 1943, the horses were moved from their positions on either side of the Reich Chancellery staircase to the sculpture factory in Wriezen, a town 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of Berlin. The Wriezen complex was used to produce large-scale Nazi sculptures and architectural features using a workforce of skilled and unskilled Italian and French prisoners of war. It also had storage sheds containing art treasures looted from Nazi-occupied territories.

The town was occupied by Soviet troops in 1945 and became part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The next time the statues were seen, it was 1950 and they were on the sports field of a Red Army barracks in the town of Eberswalde (Brandenburg). Thorak’s Walking Horses spent 38 years on the field and they saw some rough treatment. Damaged by bullet holes, the horses were painted over in gold. At some point their tales broke off and were reattached crudely.

In March of 1988, art historian Magdalena Busshart found the horses on the sports field and identified them as Thorak’s monumental bronzes. In January of 1989 Busshart published an article about the horses in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a Frankfurt daily newspaper. A few weeks later, a reader told her that the horses were gone. Experts believe they were sold by the GDR government which in 1989 was facing its imminent demise and was in dire need of hard currency. They disappeared from the record at that point only to reappear again in mysterious online sales postings.

The investigation began in 2013 when an informant told the Berlin police that someone was attempting to sell the pair of horses online. Last year, Arthur Brand, who runs a private firm that researches the ownership history of artworks with a specialty in tracing art the Nazis stole from Jews, saw photographs of the horses in a sale offer seeking 8 million euros ($8.9 million) for the pair. At first he thought the pictures had to be fakes, that the horses were long gone, destroyed in the death throes of the GDR. After following the trail through German archives, old newsreels, his contacts in the Russian military and even satellite images, Brand came to believe the photographs showed the genuine article. In late 2014, Brand relayed his information to the Berlin police.

One of the eight suspects claims he is the legitimate owner of the tons of art in the Bad Duerkheim warehouse. According to his attorney, Andreas Hiemsch, the man lawfully acquired the art from the Red Army more than 25 years ago and even offered to loan some of them to museums. Sorting out legal ownership is going to be a challenge. The Red Army/GDR sale may be hard to document; the Federal Republic of Germany has a claim as the successor of the GDR; the artists’ heirs might have a viable ownership claim. It could be years before it’s all sorted.

Plaster casts of Vesuvius’ victims restored

Ancient, Museums

When Vesuvius erupted on August 24th, 79 A.D., a column of ash and pumice rained down on Pompeii, depositing as much as a foot per hour in some parts of the city. Fleeing the shower of stone and ash, many people took shelter in buildings, a deadly choice as it happened, since within six hours from the beginning of the eruption, the weight of accumulated pumice fall caused roofs and walls to collapse. An anomalously high percentage of the remains of people who died in this phase of the eruption — 345 individuals, or 88% of the people killed during the pumice fall deposit phase — were found indoors, killed by the buildings they had taken fled to for protection. Out of the people found outdoors (49 of them, or 12% of the pumice fall victims), most of them were probably killed by debris from collapsing structures. The rest were likely felled by larger stones striking them at ballistic speeds.

Most of the remains discovered, 650 people, were found in pyroclastic density currents (PDCs) deposit, 334 (51%) of them outdoors, 316 (49%) indoors. There is no evidence that they were burned to death. They were encased by fine ash and covered by the pyroclastic flow that blanketed the town, sealing in the ash and pumice layer and suffocating the people trapped underneath it to death.

The ash and pyroclastic layers hardened quickly around the bodies. The soft tissues decomposed over time, leaving only bones in cavities once occupied by whole bodies. More than 1700 years later, excavators of the ancient site noticed that underneath the skeletal remains of a young woman was an imprint of her breasts and body. They didn’t know how to preserve it, however, so the imprint was lost as excavations continued, as were similar such finds.

The breakthrough came on February 5th, 1863, when Giuseppe Fiorelli, Pompeii’s director of works who introduced a revolutionary new scientific rigor to the excavation of the city, was told by a labourers that they had found a cavity with bones at the bottom. Fiorelli told them to stop digging immediately and had plaster poured into that cavity and two others found nearby. They waited two days for the plaster to dry and then chipped away the ash exposing the cast of a person killed during the eruption of Vesuvius almost 1800 years earlier. Facial expressions, clothes, the position of the bodies all were perfectly captured by the plaster casts.

Plaster had been used once before in 1856 to capture an imprint in the ash, but it was the imprint of a long-gone architectural feature, not of a human being. That was Fiorelli’s brilliant innovation. He remained director of works until 1875. Under his leadership, plaster casts were made of people, animals — most famously the dog on its back with four legs in the air found in the House of Orpheus — furniture, doors, window frames, even the holes in the ground left by roots. The plaster casts of roots allowed archaeologists to identify plants with enough precision to recreate the landscaped pleasure gardens of the wealthy a well as the more practical vegetable gardens that fed the people of Roman-era Pompeii.

It was the expressive pathos of the human figures, their final moments frozen in time by the volcano that killed them, that has made a profound impression in all who have seen them since 1863. Luigi Settembrini, professor of Italian literature at the University of Naples, visited the site just a few days after the first castings were made. That night, February 13th, 1863, unable to sleep, he wrote a letter to Fiorelli.

It’s impossible to see those three cast figures and not feel moved. […] They’ve been dead for 18 centuries, but they are human creatures seen in their agony. This is not art, not imitation, but their bones, the reliquaries of their flesh and clothes mixed with plaster: it’s the pain of death that reacquired body and shape. […] Up until now there have been discovered temples, houses and other objects to interest the curiosity of cultured people, artists and archaeologists, but now you, oh my Fiorelli, have discovered human pain, and whoever is human feels it.

The filling of the cavities with plaster has continued ever since. In 1984 they tried a different medium, resin instead of plaster. Inspired by the lost wax method of bronze casting, archaeologists injected wax into the cavity left by the body of a young woman found in the Villa of Lucius Crassius Tertius in Oplontis. Once the wax was hardened, it was coated in plaster. The wax was then melted and the empty plaster cast filled with liquid epoxy resin. The result was a transparent cast through which you could see the Maiden of Oplontis’ bones and her jewelry in situ. Although its transparency and durability are marked advantages, resin casting is complicated, time consuming and expensive. Today Pompeii’s archaeologists are still using plaster. It’s a tricky process. Only a small percentage of the remains found can be cast — there are only around 100 plaster casts (including animals) out more than 1,100 bodies found — due to the condition of the ash shell, and the bones are very brittle. The plaster has to be thick enough to support the bones suspended in it but thin enough to flow freely into nooks and crannies so it can capture all possible detail.

Because the casts are human remains, archaeologists have been reluctant to restore them. The very old plaster has begun to degrade, however, exposing the bones inside. Now, as part of the Great Pompeii Project, a program of restoration and stabilization of many endangered areas of the ancient archaeological site, all 86 plaster casts of human remains are being restored. The plaster is being rehydrated where possible and repaired where it has crumbled away. The casts have been X-rayed and laser scanned so archaeologists knew exactly where everything inside was before they began to work on the plaster. With the precise data mapping of the laser scan, restorers have also been able to create precise replicas of the cast with 3D printing. That will be very helpful going forward for traveling exhibitions and the like.

This video, which I would strongly recommend muting, shows an overview of the restoration, starting with the casts being moved from the areas of the archaeological site where they’ve been on display to the restoration workshop (set up in one of Pompeii’s ancient buildings) of the Special Superintendency for the Archaeological Heritage of Naples and Pompeii. It’s remarkable how much it looks like the wounded being carried on stretchers to a field hospital full of war casualties.

[youtube=https://youtu.be/fnBwgJQzbgQ&w=430]

Twenty of the restored casts will go on display in Pompeii’s amphitheater as part of the Pompeii and Europe exhibition starting May 27th and running through November 2nd. The exhibition will take place concurrently at the Naples National Archaeological Museum.

Medieval panels looted from Devon church found

Looting, Medieval, Modern(ish)

Two 15th century painted oak panels ripped out of Holy Trinity Church in Torbryan, Devon, almost two years ago have been recovered by police. A sharp-eyed and damn decent collector spotted them in an online sale and notified the authorities who traced them in a property in south London. The place was raided by detectives from the Metropolitan Police Art & Antiques Unit in January and the panels recovered. A 50-year-old man from Wales has been arrested for the theft.

The panels were part of a rood screen, a tracery partition separating the nave from the chancel, built between 1460 and 1470. Inset in Gothic arches that mimic the design of the church’s stained glass windows are a series of 40 oak panels painted with figures of God, Mary, the Apostles and a panoply of saints. They are of extremely high quality, “cathedral quality,” according to the art historian Dr. Neil Rushton of the Churches Conservation Trust. Painted by a top artist of the period at the same time the church was constructed, the rood screen panels are colorful evidence of how much money, mainly from the wool trade, was in the area in the second half of the 15th century. They are the country’s best surviving examples of this kind of art from the late Middle Ages, almost all of which was destroyed in the Reformation, and therefore of national importance.

The panels that were stolen depict St. Victor of Marseilles and St. Margaret of Antioch, lesser known saints which make them rarer than the panels with more common iconography. Because of their rarity, there was speculation at the time of the theft that it may have been commissioned by an underworld collector who coveted these specific pieces, but the commissioned theft idea always gets deployed after these sort of crimes and it usually turns out to be a lot more Keystone Cops and a lot less Thomas Crown. This case is no different. Commissioned thefts don’t wind up for sale online.

Churches have increasingly been frequent targets of thieves, often for the scrap value of their architectural materials like lead roof tiles or even paving stones and grave markers. Art is a riskier proposition since it’s more likely to be recognizable, but that hasn’t stopped thieves from taking the chance before at the Holy Trinity Church. Four of the original 40 panels were stolen in the 1990s and three more were taken in 2003. Those seven panels are still missing which makes the recovery of the two most recent thefts even more significant.

West Mercia Police are now leading the investigation into the theft as part of Operation Icarus, which has also recovered a treasure trove of other church artefacts, including stonework, friezes, statues, paintings, brasses, misericords, stained glass and bibles. The police are appealing for help in identifying the artefacts, which include the misericords from St Cuthbert’s Church at Holme Lacy in Herefordshire, also in the care of The Churches Conservation Trust.

In response to the original theft, The Churches Conservation Trust conducted a thorough audit of security at Holy Trinity, Torbryan and a new alarm system is now in place at the church to protect its contents in future. A new scheme of interpretation is also being developed to explain the artworks and the history of this unique Grade I listed church to visitors. A service at the church on 30th May will give thanks for the return of the panels.

The 45 cm (17.7 inches) by 15 cm (6 inches) panels were stolen between August 2nd and 9th of 2013 when the church was open to the public. They are believed to have been pushed out of their casing from the front, but a panel of an unknown female saint to the immediately left of the stolen pieces was seriously damaged in the process. It was punched through and a large shard from the top of the panel to the saint’s legs broke off. Now that the missing panels have been recovered, it’s clear there was damage done to them as well during the theft. The restoration is expect to cost £7,000 ($10,843) and the Churches Conservation Trust has launched a campaign to raise the funds.

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Bronze Age Egtved Girl was not from Denmark

Ancient

Egtved Girl, the Bronze Age woman whose exceptionally well-preserved grave was discovered near the village of Egtved on the Jutland peninsula of southeastern Denmark, was not born in Denmark. Researchers from the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen studied the remains of her body, clothes and accessories using a combination of biomolecular, biochemical and geochemical techniques to determine not just where she was born and raised, but also to trace her movements in the years before her death and burial. Read the full study here.

The grave of Egtved Girl was excavated from the eastern side of the Storehøj barrow in 1921. She had been put to rest in a hollowed out oak trunk lined with cow hide and grave goods placed inside with her. Next to her head was a box made of bark containing a bronze awl and a hair net. At her feet was a birch bucket with a brown residue composed of ingredients like bog cranberries, wheat and lime tree pollen that were used to make a kind of mead. She wore bronze arm rings on each arm, an earring in one ear and a bronze belt plate of impressive size. A horn comb was attached to her belt. Her clothing was a short woven tunic and a cord skirt 15 inches long wound twice around her waist. both made of wool.

Although so many organic materials survived her long slumber, most of her own tissues decayed. Only her blonde hair, teeth, nails, and a small amount of skin and brain remained. Her bones probably dissolved in the acidic environment inside the coffin. A bundle of cloth was found to containing the cremated remains of a child 5-6 years old. A few charred bone fragments from the child were found in the bark box near her head. Egtved Girl was probably not her mother as her teeth indicate she was just 16-18 at the time of death. Dendrochronological analysis of the coffin dated the burial to 1,370 B.C.

For so young a woman to have such a high status burial is very rare. She must have held an important position in society, possibly a priestess or a ritual dancer. You might think, therefore, that she was local. To pinpoint her origins, the multi-disciplinary study used strontium isotope analysis of her first molar. They also tested the strontium isotope signature of the occipital bone of the child buried with her. The results were statistically indistinguishable, so the girl and the child came from the same place. Comparison to the Danish baseline and the specific strontium isotope values of the Egtved burial site excluded Denmark as their likely place of origin.

Her clothes weren’t local either. Strontium isotope analysis found only a single wool cord in the container with the child’s cremated remains that was of Danish origin. The rest of the wool fibers tested, all of them very high quality, had varied strontium isotope values that indicate the sheep grazed in an area with a widely varied ecology. The possible range for the origin of Egtved Girl, the child she was buried with and her garments stretches from southern Scandinavia to southern Germany, but researchers believe she was from the Black Forest which has a variety of strontium isotope values commensurate with those in the wool fibers.

“In Bronze Age Western Europe, Southern Germany and Denmark were the two dominant centres of power, very similar to kingdoms. We find many direct connections between the two in the archaeological evidence, and my guess is that the Egtved Girl was a Southern German girl who was given in marriage to a man in Jutland so as to forge an alliance between two powerful families,” [University of Gothenburg professor] Kristian Kristiansen says.

According to him, Denmark was rich in amber and traded amber for bronze. In Mycenaean Greece and in the Middle East, Baltic amber was as coveted as gold, and, through middlemen in Southern Germany, large quantities of amber were transported to the Mediterranean, and large quantities of bronze came to Denmark as payment. In the Bronze Age, bronze was as valuable a raw material as oil is today so Denmark became one of the richest areas of Northern Europe.

“Amber was the engine of Bronze Age economy, and in order to keep the trade routes going, powerful families would forge alliances by giving their daughters in marriage to each other and letting their sons be raised by each other as a kind of security,” Kristian Kristiansen says.

To determine her travels in the two years before her death, the research team used her nine-inch-long hair. The strontium signature indicates she that 13-15 months before she died, she was somewhere with very similar strontium values to the place she was born. Then she moved probably to Jutland where she stayed for about 9 or ten months before going back home for four to six months. Her last trip was to Egtved about a month before her death. This is the first time researchers have been able to trace the movements of a prehistoric person with such precision.

Our study provides evidence for long-distance and periodically rapid mobility. Our findings compel us to rethink European Bronze Age mobility as highly dynamic, where individuals moved quickly, over long distances in relatively brief periods of time.