Month: December 2016

Ancient necropolis found in Bordeaux city center

Ancient, Medieval

Archaeologists have discovered an exceptionally large and diverse ancient necropolis in the center of Bordeaux. The site, known as Castéja, hosted the first school for deaf girls in France (the main building built in 1862 is a historic monument). More recently it was the city’s central police station. The police station was closed in 2003 and in 2014 the property was sold to developers for an ambitious mixed incoming housing project. An archaeological survey was commissioned in advance of new construction.

So far around 40 graves containing the skeletal remains of about 300 people have been unearthed. Archaeologist and excavation director Xavier Perrot thinks the number of burials will increase as the excavation proceeds, perhaps even doubling. The burials begin in late antiquity (the 4th century) and continue through the early Middle Ages. There are a variety of tombs: ancient tile graves, amphora burials for babies, inhumations with traces of wooden coffins, brick-lined burial pits. Archaeologists also found two Merovingian-era sarcophagi and some very rare medieval coins.

The contents of the graves are unusually diverse for the period. Some are individual burials, while others contain multiple bodies piled on top of each other in a haphazard fashion. They appear to have been tossed in the grave hastily, which suggests they have been victims of mass violence, or more likely, of an epidemic. The Plague of Justinian, a pandemic that swept through the Byzantine Empire before spreading to the Mediterranean port cities and the rest of Europe in the mid-6th century, is a possible culprit. The remains will be subjected to a battery of laboratory tests to determine the dates of those burials and identify the epidemic, should there be one to identify.

Very few burial grounds this densely packed with remains are extant from antiquity. There are maybe three or four comparable sites in France and one in Bavaria, and none of those are as large as the Bordeaux find.

“This is an important operation. We see the evolution of the urban fabric and changes in burial arrangements with inhumations in the ground, in coffins, sarcophagi, a funerary space that evolves with a pit, multiple burials”, said Nathalie Fourment, regional curator of archeology at the regional Direction of Cultural Affairs (DRAC).

Excavations began early last month and were originally scheduled to end on January 20th, but because of the importance of the find, DRAC is negotiating an extension with property owner Gironde Habitat.

V&A acquires watercolor of Henry VIII’s lost Nonsuch Palace

Museums, Renaissance


The Victoria and Albert museum has acquired a unique watercolor of Nonsuch Palace painted from life by Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel. He signed and dated it 1568, which makes it the earliest surviving depiction of the grand palace and one of the earliest surviving English landscape watercolors. Only six contemporary depictions of Nonsuch are known, and this one is the most detailed and accurate. They are all the more precious because the palace was destroyed 150 years after it was built. The watercolor was sold at auction to a foreign buyer, but a temporary export ban gave British institutions the change to keep this rare glimpse into a lost Renaissance architectural masterpiece. The price tag was a steep £1 million ($1,257,450). The V&A was able to raise the money with help from grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and the Art Fund.

Construction on the palace began in April of 1538, six months after the birth of Henry VIII’s obsessively desired son and heir, Edward. Unlike his other 13 palaces around London, this one was built from scratch, not an addition to a previous structure. Henry picked the location near Ewell in Surrey because it was next to his favorite hunting grounds. The fact that a village and church stood there was no deterrent. He paid compensation and demolished the structures to make room for a great Franco-Italianate palace whose splendour would outdo any other monarch’s (especially Henry’s archrival Francis I of France) grandest residence.

Covered in hundreds of elaborate stucco high reliefs bordered with carved and gilded slate, the palace was dubbed Nonsuch because it was sui generis, one of a kind. There was no other such palace in Europe. The reliefs in the inner courtyard depicted figures from Classical mythology and history. They were organized in three levels. On the top were Roman emperors, in the middle gods and goddesses, and on the bottom the Labours of Hercules on the west side of the courtyard and the Liberal Arts and Virtues on the east. On the south side was a relief of Henry VIII with his son Edward, a celebration of the Tudor dynasty as the culmination (at least in the king’s mind), of all those emperors, deities and muses.

The palace was unfinished when Henry VIII died in 1547 (all the important bits were done and it was entirely livable). Queen Mary I sold the palace to Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel, in 1557 and he finally finished it. He’s the one who probably commissioned Joris Hoefnagel to paint the palace. Nonsuch returned to the crown in 1592, purchased by Elizabeth I who loved it and used it extensively. It remained a royal property until the Civil War. After the execution of Charles I in 1649, it was confiscated along with the rest of the crown’s property and sold.

With the restoration of the monarch in 1660, Nonsuch was returned to the crown. Charles II had little interest in the Renaissance masterpiece, and 10 years later he deeded it to his mistress, the tempestuous and profligate Barbara Palmer, 1st Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Castlemaine. In 1682, Barbara took it upon herself to demolish the palace and sell it off piecemeal to pay off her enormous gambling debts. It took years to take the whole thing apart, at least until 1688. As late as 1702, one of the turreted gate houses still stood.

Just to give you an idea of high on the “because people are crazy” scale the Duchess of Cleveland was, she didn’t even sell the stucco panels! They were busted up to bits and an estimated 100,000 fragments carted off somewhere. The first archaeological exploration of the site of the demolished palace in 1959 recovered more than 1,500 fragments with visible decoration and many more plain stucco fragments. Out of all those fragments a single panel was able to be partially reconstructed, that of a Roman soldier sitting next to his shield (now in the Museum of London). You can actually see a soldier and his shield on Hoefnagel’s watercolor, and it is located just above the spot where the fragments were discovered. This is a perfect example of why this one watercolor is so historically and culturally significant.

Mark Evans, Senior Curator of Word and Image at the V&A, said: “Painted in 1568 by the last of the great Flemish illuminators and a foremost topographical artist of the day, this is a rare and beautiful work of outstanding importance. Among the earliest surviving English landscape watercolours, it brings to life one of the greatest monuments of the English Renaissance, now lost to us. We are delighted to acquire a picture of such quality and historical importance for our visitors to enjoy.”

The Joris Hoefnagel watercolor of Nonsuch Palace is now on display in the V&A’a British Galleries.

Lost 1924 Austrian film about anti-Semitism rescued

Modern(ish)

While anti-Semitism was common in Austrian politics at the turn of the century, particularly in Vienna where the vast majority of Austria’s Jews lived, the 1867 constitution had eliminated all remaining laws discriminating against Jews. The end of World War I, the fall of Habsburg monarchy and the subsequent political and economic turmoil in the former empire ushered in a new, more violent, more organized form of anti-Semitism. The Antisemitenbund (Anti-Semites League) was founded in September 1919. That same month eight speakers stood in front of Vienna’s city hall advocating the expulsion of all Jews from the city before a rapt crowd of 5,000 people. When the Antisemitenbund organized a congress of anti-Semites in 1921, 40,000 people attended.

It wasn’t just talk. Prominent Jews — writers, intellectuals, publishers — were beaten on the streets. The courts provided little justice to the victims of these hate crimes, no matter how brutal the perpetrators. Best-selling novelist Hugo Bettauer became a target of anti-Semitic parties including the Nazi Party, the Christian Social Party and the Greater German People’s Party because of his writing. Born in 1872 the son of prosperous Jewish stockbroker, Bettauer converted to the Evangelical denomination of Christianity when he joined the army at the age of 18. It was a formality, not a genuine conversion, done because it was well known that Jews were denied advancement and promotion in the military. In the end Bettauer was too much of a free spirit for the army and the career he’d converted for ended after a few months.

He made his name writing satirical fiction. His most famous novel was Die Stadt ohne Juden: Ein Roman von Übermorgen (The City Without Jews: A Novel from the Day After Tomorrow), published in 1922. Set in Vienna, the book satirizes the growing anti-Semitism in politics and culture. A politician named Dr. Karl Schwertfeger, modelled after former mayor of Vienna Karl Lueger who Hitler would write about in glowing terms in Mein Kampf for his anti-Jewish beliefs, orders that all Jews be expelled from Vienna. In a chilling preview of future events, Schwertfeger borrows 30 stock car trains to pack the 200,000 Jews of Vienna (out of 220,000 total in Austria) off to the east. In short order, the city completely falls apart and the politicians beg for the Jews to come back. The novel sold more than 250,000 copies and was translated into multiple languages.

The response from the anti-Semitic parties was immediate and vocal. He was accused of Communism and, in what one hopes is a classical allusion but was probably unironic pomposity, of being a “corruptor of the youth.” Bettauer was even put on trial for these so-called offenses. He was charged with 16 counts of harming public morality. Surprisingly, he was acquitted of all them.

A year later, the novel was being made into a movie by director Hans Karl Breslauer. Keen to avoid some of the controversy around the book, Breslauer changed the setting from Vienna to a fictional city named Utopia and obscured other recognizable real world details. He also emphasized comedic aspects of the story. It didn’t help at all. The film premiered in Vienna on July 25th, 1924, and even though it wasn’t the blockbuster the novel had been, Nazis still protested, causing a ruckus at showings of the film and ramping up their criticisms of Bettauer in the press. Austrian Nazi Kaspar Hellering wrote screeds exhorting the lynching of “polluters of our people” like Bettauer. On March 10th, 1925, Otto Rothstock stepped up to do just that. He shot Bettauer in his office. Two weeks later, Bettauer died of his wounds.

Rothstock claimed he was motivated by Bettauer’s immorality (he advocated free love, wrote and published an erotic lifestyle weekly), but it was no coincidence that he was a former member of the National Socialist party. His financial supporters and legal defenders were either Nazis or had strong ties to the party. Even though he never admitted it, the murder was motivated by anti-Semitism, both against the author’s own Jewishness and the mockery he’d made of anti-Semitism in the book and movie. Rothstock was tried by a sympathetic court and sent to a psychiatric facility. He was released in 18 months.

The movie suffered greatly from state and local censorship. A severely edited and incomplete version of it managed to survive in a Dutch film museum archive (it was rediscovered there in 1991), a miracle in and of itself given the volatility of nitrate film and the toll the war took on Austrian films. Die Stadt ohne Juden is one very few Austrian expressionist films still extant. In October of 2015, a French film collector contacted the Austrian Film Archive to tell them he’d found a film relevant to their interests at a Paris flea market. When the Austrian experts examined the footage, they found it was a version of Die Stadt ohne Juden complete with missing footage and original ending.

It includes the hitherto lost ending of the film, while the other sequences found reveal an obviously dramaturgically staged parallel narrative. Previously unknown images show Jewish life in Vienna with a clear anti-Semitic connotation. The famous expressionist scene featuring Hans Moser in the role of a ruthless anti-Semite is available in its entirety for the first time. All in all, the political message of the film and the depiction of murderous anti-Semitism in Vienna in the wake of World War I are now significantly more sharply articulated. Upon completion of the restoration work, it may be possible to present DIE STADT OHNE JUDEN, more than 90 years after its premiere, in an almost complete and authentic version once again.

To bring this culturally and historically significant movie back to modern audiences, the Austrian Film Archive needed funding, first to copy it from highly explosive nitrate film to a stable medium and then convert it to digital. They started a crowdfounding campaign to raise the 75,500 euros necessary to conserve the film. The campaign exceeded its goal and currently stands at 85,159 euros with hours left to go.

Is this Robert the Bruce which you see before you?

Medieval, Modern(ish)

Robert the Bruce, hero of Bannockburn and King of Scots (r. 1306-1329) He died comparatively young, a month before 55th birthday, of an unknown ailment. His body was buried in Dunfermline Abbey where a passel of Scottish kings and queens were laid to rest. The abbey was sacked in 1560 during the Scottish Reformation. The parts of it that survived the sacking fell into ruin. The nave was repaired and used as a parish church until the early 19th century when a new church was built on the site of the Benedictine abbey. Construction workers building the new parish church in 1818 unearthed the bones of Robert the Bruce in a vault underneath what was once the high altar. His remains were sealed in pitch and reburied with great pomp and circumstance, but a cast was made of the skull before the reburial.

There are no reliable contemporary written or artistic depictions of Robert the Bruce’s appearance. He had suffered multiple bouts of serious illness during his lifetime, and some English chroniclers intimated he was afflicted with leprosy. No Scottish reports mention any such affliction. Modern technology could answer many questions about Bruce if his bones were available for research, but they are not. All we have is the cast of the skull of which there are several copies.

University of Glasgow professor of Scottish history Dr. Martin MacGregor had a brainwave when he saw a documentary featuring the facial reconstruction of Richard III. He realized the technology was advanced enough now that it might work on the cast of Robert the Bruce’s skull in the University’s Hunterian Museum. He reached out to Professor Caroline Wilkinson, Director of Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU)’s Face Lab, an expert in craniofacial identification who created the facial reconstruction of Richard III.

A careful examination of the cast of Robert the Bruce’s skull does show signs of what could be leprosy. There are osteological changes to his upper jaw and nose consistent with Hansen’s Disease, but the evidence is not conclusive. Dr. Wilkinson therefore took a two-pronged approach to the reconstruction: a younger man in full health, and an older one with scarring from leprosy.


Professor Wilkinson said: “Using the skull cast, we could accurately establish the muscle formation from the positions of the skull bones to determine the shape and structure of the face. But what the reconstruction cannot show is the colour of his eyes, his skin tones and the colour of his hair. We produced two versions – one without leprosy and one with a mild representation of leprosy. He may have had leprosy, but if he did it is likely that it did not manifest strongly on his face, as this is not documented.” […]

Professor Wilkinson added: “In the absence of any DNA, we relied on statistical evaluation of the probability of certain hair and eye colours, conducted by Dr MacGregor and his team, to determine that Robert the Bruce most likely had brown hair and light brown eyes.”

“There have also been a number of advances in facial reconstruction techniques since previous depictions of this Scottish hero, including better facial feature prediction and more advanced CGI.”

“This is the most realistic appearance of Robert the Bruce to-date, based on all the skeletal and historical material available.”

This video walks through the facial reconstruction:

This one reconstructs his long-lost tomb, destroyed during the reformation.

Dutch return head of Julia Domna to Italy

Ancient, Looting, Roma, Caput Mundi

The head of a statue of Roman Empress Julia Domna that almost wound up on the auction block in Amsterdam has been returned to Italy after the Carabinieri Art Squad determined it had been recently stolen. In May of 2015, a man and a woman attempted to sell statue head through Christie’s Amstersdam office. The appraisers and experts were immediately suspicious, as they well should have been, and Christie’s lawyer called the Art Squad.

The piece, one foot high and dating to the 2nd century A.D., wasn’t on the Art Squad’s list of stolen and looted artworks, but their experts were able to trace its origins to Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, the imperial country retreat/enormous palace built by the Emperor Hadrian in second and third decades of the 2nd century. A number of Severan dynasty portrait busts were unearthed at the villa during excavations in the 1950s, evidence that it was used by the imperial family well into the 3rd century. It was last on display in 2012 at an exhibition held in the Museum of the Canopus. Someone apparently stole the head after that, possibly from storage.

The auction house cooperated with the investigation, suspending the sale so the Art Squad and the Dutch police could work together to research the head. In addition to confirming the true origin of the object, the joint investigation identified two Dutch citizens who were illegally in possession of the statue head. Armed with all the evidence, the police confiscated the portrait and returned it to representatives of the Carabinieri Art Squad. It will be kept with authorities in Rome while the legal case proceeds. When it’s all over, Julia Domna will go back to Hadrian’s Villa with all her family members.

Born in what is today Homs, Syria, to a wealthy family of senatorial rank, Julia Domna was the second wife of Septimius Severus (r. 193-211 A.D.). He chose her because she had been prophesied to marry a king, and Severus was a rising political and military star with ambitions for the imperial throne. They married in around 186 A.D. Their union was by all accounts a happy one. She was intelligent, highly educated, a patron of philosophers and politically astute. Severus relied on her counsel and very unusually for the time, took her with him on military campaigns.

Julia Domna bore him two sons, Caracalla and Geta, who hated each other bitterly. She tried to smooth things over between them and their father — Caracalla co-ruled with his father from 198 until his death — to ensure a smooth succession, never a simple thing at the best of times, and certainly not when a new dynasty was in play. When Severus died in Eboracum (modern-day York), he left the empire to both Caracalla and Geta. His last words to them, reported by Cassius Dio, “Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men.”

This was not advice the young men chose to follow to the letter. Caracalla had his brother killed by members of the Praetorian Guard before the year was out. He did follow his father’s dictum when it came to soldier pay, showering them with bonuses so generous that he soon had to debase the currency. It didn’t buy him security, though. In 217, he was killed by a disgruntled soldier egged on by the Praetorian Guard Prefect Macrinus, that same Macrinus who would just happened to become the next emperor.

During Caracalla’s six years of solo rule, his mother did all the grunt work of being emperor. Caracalla was on campaign most of the time, so it was Julia Domna who took on the onerous duties of administering a vast territory where every single legal dispute, no matter how picayune, was adjudicated by the emperor. The amount of paperwork the imperial administration had to deal with was staggering, hence the staff of thousands of slaves, freedmen, clerks, translators, etc. necessary to keep the wheels turning. Caracalla showed a mark disinterest in this aspect of the job, while his mother proved willing and able. After she heard of his assassination, Julia Domna committed suicide.

Her distinctive style, evident in her portraiture, and her great power and influence during the reings of her husband and son, make her busts among the most recognizable. The one, the only forensic hairdresser Janet Stephens covers Julia Domna’s styling in videos on her YouTube Channel.

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