Month: March 2017

The Colosseum after antiquity

Ancient, Medieval, Modern(ish), Museums

The Colosseum is the most visited monument in the world today. The great amphitheater built in Rome during the reigns of the Flavian dynasty emperors Vespasian and Titus (72-80 A.D.) is an icon of ancient Roman engineering and bloodlust, but it has outlived the empire that created it by 1,500 years. The Colosseum saw many changes in its long post-antiquity lifespan, its architecture altered by activity both human and seismic, dedicated to a wide variety of uses from cemetery to shopping mall to fortress. That rich later history is overshadowed by its ancient resume, and the millions of tourists who flock to the Colosseum every year hear a lot more about the gladiatorial combat of the 1st century than about the butchers’ stalls of the 11th.

A new exhibition seeks to correct that oversight. Colosseum. An Icon is the first exhibition to tell the full story of the Flavian Amphitheater, from the gladiators to the butchers and beyond. It covers the numerous attempts at repair and restoration, how the space was repurposed over the centuries, the construction of brick buttresses in the 19th century to keep the outer walls from collapse, how it became a favorite subject of artists from the Renaissance through the Grand Tour era, launching it as the iconic representation of the city of Rome and ancient Roman grandeur. That image spread even wider when moneyed travelers brought back fine marble miniatures and micromosaics of the Colosseum as souvenirs in the 19th century.

The exhibition also illustrates the profound shift in attitude towards the amphitheater from Christians in general and the Papacy in particular. The last recorded games were held in 523 A.D., an animal hunt celebrating the consulship of Anicius Maximus, and already then the Colosseum was very much reduced. The top gallery had collapsed, entrances were impassable, the hypogeum flooded. Neglect, earthquakes and the failure of the unmaintained drainage system took an enormous toll on the building. Travel writers in the Middle Ages thought it was some sort of pagan temple and associated it with nefarious demonic goings-on.

That demon-haunted reputation clung to the Colosseum well into the Renaissance. Renown goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini had a raucously occult experience at the amphitheater in the 1530s which he recounts in his memoirs.

We went together to the Coliseum; and there the priest, having arrayed himself in necromancer’s robes, began to describe circles on the earth with the finest ceremonies that can be imagined. I must say that he had made us bring precious perfumes and fire, and also drugs of fetid odour. When the preliminaries were completed, he made the entrance into the circle; and taking us by the hand, introduced us one by one inside it. Then he assigned our several functions; to the necromancer, his comrade, he gave the pentacle to hold; the other two of us had to look after the fire and the perfumes; and then he began his incantations. This lasted more than an hour and a half; when several legions appeared, and the Coliseum was all full of devils.

As late as 1594, the Popes were still renting the Colosseum out to glue makers and contemplating converting the whole structure into a factory with residences for the workers in the top galleries. That changed in the Jubilee year of 1675, when Pope Clement X declared the Colosseum a sacred site of martyrdom for all the Christians said to have been condemned to death in the arena. (There is little evidence that Christians were martyred at the Colosseum, btw, and the stories of martyrdom in the amphitheater only began circulating in the Renaissance.) Clement had ambitious plans to dedicate a church to the martyrs inside the Colosseum, asking the great polymath Gianlorenzo Bernini to design it. It was too expensive, though, so Clement just had a cross installed in the arena instead.

The idea didn’t die with him. Twenty years later, architect Carlo Fontana was enlisted to design a prospective Church of the Holy Martyrs inside the Colosseum. Again, the church never happened, but he studied the amphitheater in great detail for this project and wrote a book about its architecture, ancient history, current condition and the proposed church that was published posthumously in 1725. (Random History Blog connection: Fontana’s original architectural drawing of the church in the Colosseum is in the collection of the wonderful Sir John Sloane’s Museum in London.) The architectural model and several of Fontana’s drawings are on display in the new exhibition.

The major restoration of the Colosseum, which is still ongoing, discovered many objects and remains from its later life which are will be part of the exhibition. An abundance of butchered animal bones and cooking utensils were found, a testament to the butchers, eateries and private residences which rented space in the ground-level vaults through the 12th century. Of course they unearthed ancient sculptures and architectural details galore. They will join one of only two surviving statues of the 160 that adorned the arches of the second and third-floor arcades when the Colosseum was first built.

The restoration also discovered traces of the Colosseum’s life as a fortress for the powerful Roman noble Frangipani family. Restorers found holes bored into travertine blocks on the top tier of the southern wall. The holes held beams that supported a wooden walkway used by Frangipani soldiers as a lookout station. The find was announced Monday at the press conference about the new exhibition.

Colosseum. An Icon opens Wednesday, March 8th and runs almost a full year until January 7th, 2018. It’s at the Colosseum, in case that wasn’t clear.

Unique Lodz Ghetto photos at the MFA, Boston

Modern(ish), Museums

The Lodz Ghetto was the second largest (after the Warsaw Ghetto) of more than 1,000 ghettos created to corral Jews in cities as the first step in the “cleansing,” ie, extermination, of European Jewry. Conditions were appalling by design, so that the overcrowding, disease and starvation would do the Nazi’s murderous work for them. Starting in 1942, ghetto residents were regularly deported to concentration camps. Chelmo, the first extermination camp with a gassing system (trucks, not chambers), opened in December of 1941 just 30 miles from Lodz; its first victims came from the Lodz Ghetto, 70,000 of them in 1942 alone.

Because the Lodz Ghetto was uniquely productive — its factories produced uniforms and other materials for the war effort — it lasted longer than any other World War II ghetto, from 1940 until 1944. In August of 1944 it too was liquidated; everyone was rounded up and sent to their deaths, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. By the end of the war, more than 200,000 Jews had passed through the Lodz Ghetto on, their way to almost certain death at Chelmno and Auschwitz. When the Red Army liberated Lodz on January 19th, 1945, only 877 survivors, 12 of them children, emerged from their hiding places in the ghetto. Out of the 223,000 Jews who lived in Lodz before Hitler’s invasion of Poland, just 10,000 survived the war.

One of those survivors was Henryk Ross, a Polish Jew who before the war had been a journalist and sports photographer. He was employed as an official photographer for the Jewish Council, aka the Judenrat, ostensibly a self-governing body which administered the day-to-day operations of the ghetto and enforced Nazi orders. Working for the council’s the Department of Statistics, Ross’ job was to take pictures of the ghetto factories, demonstrating their productivity, and of the registered workers for their identification cards.

Ross and the other Department of Statistics photographer, Mendel Grossman, secretly took unauthorized photographs of the horrors all around them. Ross captured the deportations, destruction and deprivations — barefoot workers pushing carts of human excrement out of the ghetto (there was no plumbing or sewage), public executions, children torn from their parents during the Sperre, the September 1942 mass deportation of almost all of the children under 10 to Chelmo where they would be murdered. He also captured small moments of daily life, even happy ones, amidst the nightmare, like young lovers kissing behind a shrub and a children’s birthday party. The variety and range of Ross pictures underscored the class divisions that persisted even in so extreme a context. His photos show the contrasts of ghetto life — the workers, the destitute, the well-fed and well-dressed elite.

In the summer of 1944 when it became clear the Nazis were winding down operations in the ghetto and preparing for the final slaughter, Henryk Ross saw the writing on the wall. Not expecting to survive, he buried 6,000 negatives. His wife and a few select friends helped him, so they knew where Ross’ photographic treasure trove was hidden should he die. As it happened, Ross was not deported to the extermination camps. He was one of the 800 Jews ordered to clean the ghetto. Of course they Nazis were going to kill them all once the clean-up was done — they had eight mass graves dug already — but the Soviets arrived before they could get to it.

After the liberation of Lodz, Ross dug his negatives back up and found that more than half of them had survived. He later said of his fateful decision: “Just before the closure of the ghetto I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our tragedy, namely the total elimination of the Jews from Lodz by the Nazi executioners. I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.”

He certainly got his wish — his pictures were used as evidence in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann — but he left a broader historical record than that, documenting the realities of life and death in the ghetto.

Ross’ collection of photographs and film was donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in 2007. The AGO has collaborated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) to organize an exhibition of Henryk Ross’ Lodz Ghetto photographs, plus film of the Eichmann trial and Lodz artifacts like identification cards from the ghetto, notices and announcements. Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross debuted at the AGO last year. It will open at the MFA on March 25th and runs through July 30th, 2017.

The AGO has created an exceptional website with more than 4000 images from the Henryk Ross collection. You can search by keyword and create an online collection of your own for the price of a free registration.

Skeletons of early colonists found under Florida mall

Modern(ish)

Archaeologists have unearthed human remains under a Florida mall that may be some of the earliest colonists in what would become the United States. The excavation began this February after David White, owner of the Fiesta Mall in downtown St. Augustine, offered city archaeologist Carl Halbirt a chance to dig under a recently closed wine shop whose floor had been damaged by Hurricane Matthew last fall. They quickly found a human bone, a right elbow, and further excavation found that it belonged to an articulated and complete skeleton. A second skull was found near the skull of the intact skeleton. Meanwhile, digging just outside the building unearthed a leg and a skull from two different individuals.

Carl Halbirt believes they were buried inside the Church of Nuestra Senora de los Remedios, the earliest documented parish church in the United States. The 2010 excavation of a parking lot a block west of the Fiesta Mall discovered a builder’s trench and the back wall of the church. The front of the church faced the bay, just like the mall building does today. The 1888 structure is a National Historic landmark today, but it’s just the latest in a long line of different buildings constructed around the St. Augustine’s historic Plaza area, the central green characteristic of Spanish urban design. The plaza served as community’s meeting ground and recreational area, and would be ringed with important civic, religious and military buildings. The plaza and Nuestra Senora de los Remedios were built in the same year: 1572, seven years after the founding of the city by conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés.

The first church of Nuestra Senora de los Remedios was burned down in 1586 by Sir Francis Drake. Queen Elizabeth had sent him to raid Spanish holdings in the Old World and New. England’s support of the Dutch rebellion against Spain had been made official in the Treaty of Nonsuch in 1585, and Philip II retaliated by seizing English merchant vessels in Spanish waters. While he began the naval build-up that would lead to the Spanish Armada’s miserably failed attempt to invade Britain three years later, Elizabeth sent her privateers to harry Spanish shipping and holdings. Drake did quite the round trip: England to Vigo in Galicia (sacked), to Baiona (sacked), to Santiago, Cape Verde (sacked), across the Atlanta to Santo Domingo, modern-day Dominican Republic (sacked), to Cartagena de Indias, modern-day Colombia (sacked). Last on his hit list was St. Augustine, sacked on June 6th, 1586. After that, he sailed up to Roanoke, picked up all the original colonists and returned to England.

Neustra Senora de los Remedios was rebuilt in 1587. That one burned down too, in 1599, although apparently it was an accident the second time around. The hurricane took what the fire did not. The church was rebuilt one more time before the British burned it and the city of St. Augustine to the ground in 1702. After the third fatality, Nuestra Senora was not resurrected. The parish moved to a new church and the location of Nuestra Senora de los Remedios was forgotten until its archaeological remains were rediscovered under that parking lot in 2010.

The pottery sherds found near the skeletal remains stylistically date to 1572-1586, so to the time of the first church in the 20 years after the founding of the city. The deceased were likely interred under the floor of the church, a common practice in mission churches of the colonial period. As time passed, it could be a tight fit under a modest church floor. The excavation has now unearthed at seven more burials in a compact area about 12 by six feet. Three of the burials are of children.

“We’ve mapped some of the particular bones,” [archaeologist Kathleen] Deagan pointed to some round circles she said indicated skulls. She says two of the children found were buried in the same pit, possibly at the same time.

“The bio-archaeologist will be able to tell us the precise age but he thinks — based on the bones — they probably are under 7 years old,” Deagan said.

It was not unusual for children to die so young. “When you look at the parish registers of St. Augustine, children died at a much higher rate than they do today,” Deagan explained.

Researchers will need permission from the state of Florida and the Catholic Church to do any further testing, like collecting DNA from the bones. Out of respect for the remains and the consecrated ground they were once in, the skeletal remains found under the floor will remain where they were buried. They will not be removed. The bones found outside the building will be reburied in a Catholic cemetery because the city is running a water line through the area.

The greatest one sheet I’ve ever seen

Modern(ish)

I love film history so I’ll browse movie poster sales whenever I get the chance. The catalogue for Heritage Auctions’ upcoming Vintage Movie Posters Signature Auction in Dallas on March 25-26 is a treasure chest of cinematic gems. Amidst the many iterations of cat people and leopard men, there are a surprising number of Italian posters for classic Hollywood movies as well as classic Italian ones, lobby cards and one sheets for much of Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre, iconic horror films — Frankenstein, Dracula, King Kong — and all-time greats like Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz and Singin’ in the Rain.

Some of the posters are more iconic than the movie. The famously scandalous poster for The Outlaw (United Artists, 1946) starring Jane Russell’s magnificent cleavage, was so controversial that the film, which was made in 1941, didn’t get wide release until 1946. Howard Hughes, the film’s director and producer and a connoisseur of the cleavage arts and sciences, had a new bra designed with cantilevered underwire construction to display Ms. Russell’s bosom to its best advantage. (It was terribly uncomfortable, apparently, so Jane just hiked up her straps, stuffed the cups and used her regular bra for filming and never told Hughes.) He intended to promote those breasts, Motion Picture Code be damned, hence the famous still of Jane Russell leaning back on the haystack, one of World War II’s most popular pinups, and this poster from an image originally designed by pinup illustrator and model Zoë Mozert. The pre-sale estimate for this poster is $1,500 – $3,000.

It’s not exceptional for its artistry, but the half sheet of Manhattan Melodrama (MGM, 1934) is still noteworthy for its stars — Myrna Loy and William Powell in their first of more than a dozen movies together, an up-and-coming Clark Gable — and for the crucial role the movie it advertises played in real-life historical events. Bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death by the FBI upon exiting an evening showing of Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22nd, 1934. The pre-sale estimate of $2,000 – $4,000 rests primarily on the film’s connection to this iconic moment.

The Art Deco style of this double grande poster of The Passion of Joan of Arc (Gaumont, 1928) is not only striking, but fits perfectly with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s jaw-dropping expressionist cinematography. The massive 5’3″ x 7’11” poster was designed by Rene Peron, a leading French artist already in the 1920s who would go on to have a decades-long career illustrating more than 2,000 movie posters. This is one my favorite movies. It was so original, so groundbreaking that people are still trying (and failing) to capture the emotional impact Dreyer conveyed with bare sets, rudimentary costumes, camera angles, lighting and the sublime visage of Renée Falconetti who delivers what is in my opinion the greatest tour-de-force cinematic acting performance of all time. It’s such a stellar representation of a landmark film, that it’s no surprise the pre-sale estimate for the poster is $12,000 – $24,000.

But it’s the poster for a classic horror film that inspired the title of this post. My previous favorite was the gloriously lurid red one sheet for James Whale’s 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, but this one sheet for The Invisible Man (Universal, 1933) has just supplanted it. Like the one sheet for the The Bride of Frankenstein, this one was a teaser poster, released by the studio in advance to generate buzz in theaters for an upcoming attraction. Studios didn’t usually bother with the expense of teaser posters for their horror pictures, but when they did invest in a little advance marketing, the posters that resulted were often spectacular, viz:

The Bride of Frankenstein red teaser was estimated to sell for $700,000 because of its graphic impact, the importance of the movie, and most relevantly, its extreme rarity. Apparently the reserve was not met because the poster failed to sell. The Invisible Man isn’t as rare nor the movie as culturally significant, so its pre-sale estimate is $80,000 – $160,000. I suspect that’s largely a tribute to the powerful impact of the imagery.

47 ingots alleged to be fabled metal found on shipwreck

Ancient, Treasures

In 2014, an ancient Greek shipwreck was discovered off the coast of Gela, Sicily. The ship dates to the 6th century B.C. and was transporting cargo from Greece or Asia Minor to Gela when it sank, probably in storm, just 1,000 feet from the coast. Divers recovered 39 ingots of a brass-like alloy from the wreck unlike any other metal discovered on ancient shipwrecks.

Archaeologist Sebastiano Tusa, head of Sicily’s Superintendency of the Sea, suspected the ingots might be the mysterious ancient metal orichalcum, a material about which much has been said and almost nothing known. In the dialogue Critias, the 4th century B.C. philosopher Plato describes orichalcum as a material already legendary in his time. The metal features prominently in his description of the fabled wealth of the lost island of Atlantis.

For because of the greatness of their empire many things were brought to them from foreign countries, and the island itself provided most of what was required by them for the uses of life. In the first place, they dug out of the earth whatever was to be found there, solid as well as fusile, and that which is now only a name and was then something more than a name, orichalcum, was dug out of the earth in many parts of the island, being more precious in those days than anything except gold.

And because Atlantis had something of a Vegas thing going on, they didn’t refrain from showing off their riches.

The entire circuit of the wall, which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a coating of brass, and the circuit of the next wall they coated with tin, and the third, which encompassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalcum.

In the interior of the temple the roof was of ivory, curiously wrought everywhere with gold and silver and orichalcum; and all the other parts, the walls and pillars and floor, they coated with orichalcum.

Each of the ten kings in his own division and in his own city had the absolute control of the citizens, and, in most cases,
of the laws, punishing and slaying whomsoever he would. Now the order of precedence among them and their mutual relations were regulated by the commands of Poseidon which the law had handed down. These were inscribed by the first kings on a pillar of orichalcum, which was situated in the middle of the island, at the temple of Poseidon….

The composition of this metal has been subject to much debate. Most scholars lean towards it being a brass-like alloy of zinc and copper that the ancients created by mixing zinc ore, copper and charcoal in a crucible. That could create a metal that “flashed with red light.” There is no consensus on this, however, and other theories abound. The Gela ingots were subjected to X-ray fluorescence analysis and were found to be made of an alloy of 75-80% copper, 15-20% zinc and trace amounts of nickel, lead and iron. This fits neatly with the zinc-copper alloy theory of orichalcum.

It makes sense that a valuable cargo like this would be headed to Gela. Founded around 688 B.C. by Greek colonists, Gela (then known as Ghelas) became an important Greek colony almost immediately. Only a century later, around the time when the ship sank, Gela was the most important city in Sicily. It even had its own offshoot colony, Agrigento, home of the Temple of Concord and that awesome story about the archbishop, the prostitute conspiracy and the trial with the shocking twist ending. Its government and residents had access to the best artisans and could afford the most prized materials.

The shipwreck is still being excavated. Earlier this month, divers discovered 47 more ingots of the alleged orichalcum, bring the total haul to a mind-boggling 86. They also recovered an amphora, a bottle from Massalia (modern-day Marseille), the first Greek colony in what is today France, and a pair of Corinthian helmets in outstanding condition. It’s not clear whether all of these artifacts were cargo on the same ship — there are two other known archaic shipwrecks in the area — but they were found in close proximity in a topographically homogeneous area, so Tusa believes they were indeed shipmates.