Month: July 2018

Synchroton recovers daguerreotype lost to tarnish

Modern(ish)

The intense radiation and light of the particle accelerator has done it again. We’ve already seen synchrotron X-rays read a long-erased Galen text, map the molecular composition of cannon balls from the Mary Rose and virtually open a heavily corroded 17th century box to reveal the medallions within in jaw-dropping detail. Now we can add daguerreotypes tarnished beyond recognition to the synchrotron’s ever-expanding abilities to resuscitate the fatalities of time.

The daguerreotypes in question belong to the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa, Ontario. Taken in the 19th century, they were so corroded and marred that all that was visible of one of them was a ghostly outline while the other was a hacked up Kandinsky abstract with not even the ghost of the sitter remaining. Their terrible condition made them ideal subjects for a new study on the chemical changes that cause daguerreotype degradation.

Daguerreotypes were made by exposing silver plates to iodine vapour and waiting for minutes until the vapour had made the plate light-sensitive enough to capture the image. The photographer would then develop the picture by exposing the plate to mercury vapour. A solution of sodium thiosulfate cleaned the plate of excess iodine leaving a stable image on the plate.

Pinpointing the smallest trace of chemical residue is what synchrotron technology does best. Over the past three years, researchers from Western University in London, Canada, analyzed damaged daguerreotypes at the Canadian Light Source (CLS). Findings published last year and earlier this year revealed the chemical compositions of different manifestations of tarnish, but the most recent report takes a great leap forward to reveal the people underneath.

This preliminary research at the CLS led to today’s paper and the images [lead study author and Western University phD candidate Madalena] Kozachuk collected at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source where she was able to analyze the daguerreotypes in their entirety.

Kozachuk used rapid-scanning micro-X-ray fluorescence imaging to analyze the plates, which are about 7.5 cm wide, and identified where mercury was distributed on the plates. With an X-ray beam as small as 10×10 microns (a human scalp hair averages 75 microns across) and at an energy most sensitive to mercury absorption, the scan of each daguerreotype took about eight hours.

“Mercury is the major element that contributes to the imagery captured in these photographs. Even though the surface is tarnished, those image particles remain intact. By looking at the mercury, we can retrieve the image in great detail,” said Tsun-Kong (T.K.) Sham, Western’s Canada Research Chair in Materials and Synchrotron Radiation. He also is a co-author of the research and Kozachuk’s supervisor.

This research will contribute to improving how daguerreotype images are recovered when cleaning is possible and will provide a way to seeing what’s below the tarnish if cleaning is not possible.

The identity of the two people whose images have been recovered is unknown. One is a woman, the other a man, and both daguerreotypes are early examples, perhaps dating as early as 1850. The plate of the woman was bought at a garage sale and that’s all the NGC knows about it. There’s no information at all about the fella.

The full study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports and can be read free of charge online.

Ancient tablet of Odyssey found in Olympia

Ancient

Archaeologists have discovered a clay tablet inscribed with verses from The Odyssey in Olympia, Greece. Found next to the Temple of Zeus with Roman-era artifacts, the slab is engraved with 13 verses from Odysseus’ speech to Eumaeus. Preliminary analysis suggests it dates to the Roman era, probably before the 3rd century.

Olympia, the venue of the ancient Olympic Games, was a religious center from long before Homer was a twinkle in his mamma’s eye. There is archaeological evidence of burned offerings made at the site in the 4th millennium B.C. The first known temple was constructed in the early 7th century B.C. and was dedicated to Hera. Her husband overtook her in the mid-5th century B.C. when the Sanctuary of Zeus was built on a grander scale than any of the previous religious structures. The monumental gold and ivory statue of Zeus sculpted by Phidias (who had a workshop at Olympia) was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Olympia remained a cultural and religious beacon in the classical world even after it became part of the Roman Empire. Olympic games were still held and the faithful still flocked to the sanctuaries. It suffered from earthquakes and barbarian invasions in the 3rd century, but it wasn’t until the 5th century when it really came tumbling down. Literally. Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II ordered the Temple of Zeus destroyed in 426 A.D. and a series of earthquakes in the 6th century finished the job.

The tablet was discovered during geoarchaeological survey of the site as part of the Multidimensional Space of Olympia program, a project which explores the relationships between the sanctuary and surrounding areas. During three years of fieldwork (2015-2017), a multidisciplinary team of researchers did an intensive grid survey of ancient Olympia, its immediate surroundings and the nearby villages of Epitalio and Salmone. They made several important discoveries in the process — Mycenaean chamber graves, Bronze Age terracing, the remains of an ancient polygonal wall and one very special clay tablet.

The tablet’s likely age places it at the end of Olympia’s long history of Panhellenic prominence. It’s of enormous significance because even at so late a date it is likely the oldest written extract of the Homeric epic known to survive. It is now undergoing conservation and detailed epigraphic study which will confirm or deny the preliminary dating and hopefully narrow it down further.

Victoria’s controversial chocolate gift for sale

Modern(ish)

Quakers were prohibited from getting academic degrees, so some of the traditional routes to respectable careers — medicine, law — were blocked off. The courses of study weren’t in keeping with Quaker religious standards anyway (“pagan” philosophy, “lascivious” poetry), and as Quakers increasingly engaged in wider English society and “worldly” activities like banking, commerce and retail in the 18th and 19th century, integrating their religious and ethical precepts into their business practices.

Chocolate was considered an “innocent trade,” as it was believed to have medicinal purposes and didn’t lead people into evil. Selling chocolate brought enjoyment and good health through the gifts of God’s nature. There was no moral corruption in making a nice cup of cocoa as there was in manufacturing weapons. Quakers went into the chocolate business when it was purely a beverage, developing it into the bar and candy empire that it is today. By the early 20th century, the three top chocolate and confectionary companies in England were Quaker owned and operated.

J. S. Fry & Sons was a Quaker family business. Founded in 1759, Fry’s bears numerous historic distinctions. It was the first company to use industrial equipment in the chocolate-making process, the first to mass-produce a chocolate bar and the inventor of the chocolate Easter egg.

Cadbury’s was founded by Quaker John Cadbury. John started selling coffee, tea and chocolate beverages in 1824 and built it into a successful company. It too was a family business, first John’s brother Benjamin joined him as a partner in 1848. They worked together 12 years. By the time Benjamin withdrew from the partnership in 1860, the company’s fortunes were in decline and John retired in 1861 after his wife’s death. John’s sons Richard and George took over and brought the business back from the brink to a whole new prosperity, expanding the product line from chocolate beverage to bars like the iconic Cadbury Dairy Milk which popularized milk chocolate.

Fry’s and Cadbury’s largest competitor, Rowntree’s, followed in the same Quaker footsteps. Founded by Henry Isaac Rowntree in 1862, the company was run according to Quaker principles of loving virtue. All the top three chocolatiers paid well and provided education, housing, recreational facilities and health care resources for their employees. Cadbury’s was the first company to establish the five-day work week.

So when in 1899 Queen Victoria turned to Cadbury’s, holders of the Royal Warrant as suppliers of chocolate products, to make a bar as a New Year’s present for the English troops fighting in the Boer War, the Queen’s command clashed at the most fundamental level with the pacifist principles of the “innocent trade.” The Cadbury brothers could not profit from war, but neither could they tell Queen Victoria to go suck a lemon.

To resolve their dilemma Richard and George Cadbury formed a temporary alliance with Joseph Fry and Joseph Rowntree: The three firms agreed to work together to fulfil the order. They would donate the chocolate free of charge and there would be no branding on either the chocolate or the tins.

Queen Victoria was not amused by all this. She wanted her soldiers and sailors to know that she was sending them the best British chocolate. In the face of the Royal ire, the firms took the sensible course of action. They caved in. Sort of. The tins remained unbranded but some of the chocolate and some of the interior wrapping sometimes did bear a company name.

The final product was a colorful tin painted red, gold and blue and embossed with a portrait of the Queen. It was inscribed “I wish you a Happy New Year Victoria R.I” and “South Africa 1900.”

One of those Queen Victoria South Africa tins has come up for auction. It’s in fine condition and still contains the original chocolate bar, foil wrapping and paper covering. Small differences between the tins produced by the three manufacturers identify this one as having been made by Cadbury’s.

The auction closes July 10th at noon EST, and online bidding is open. Only seven bids have been submitted so far, the top one is £84, enough to cover the reserve. The high estimate is just £120, so unless a bidding war breaks out (I think metaphoric wars are okay, Quaker-wise), this stale, faded, beige chocolate in a fabulous tin is something of a bargain.

Buon Compleanno, Artemisia!

Museums, Renaissance

Baroque master Artemisia Gentileschi would have been 425 years old today. The first woman granted membership to Florence’s Accademia del Disegno, she was famous in her time and counted the crowned heads of Europe among her clientele. Her striking works, often featuring illustrious women from history and the Bible, have become icons of female representation during a time when women were largely excluded from the painterly ranks.

Her private life has been inextricably woven into her oeuvre. She used herself as a model frequently — a number of self-portraits of her as saints, artists and allegories, particularly from her Florentine period, have survived — and her powerful female protagonists have been adopted as symbols of empowerment in the wake of her rape and the subsequent trial of the perpetrator, her art teacher Agostino Tassi. We know from the incredible survival of the transcripts that she stood up for herself at the 1611 trial even under torture. (Rape accusers in the Papal States were subjected to the thumbscrews, among other torture techniques, to ensure their veracity.) For many years she was treated by art historians something of a curiosity, a successful woman artist with a tragic personal history that seemed to be reflected in works like Judith Slaying Holofernes.

The worm has turned for Artemisia, and the understanding of her art on its own terms rather than as mere Caravaggista works or as fodder for five-cent psychological interpretations has led to a massive uptake in interest and demand from museums and collectors. In 2014, a rediscovered Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy broke the sale record for an Artemisia Gentileschi painting when it sold for €865,500 (ca. $1,175,000). In December of 2017, another rediscovered work, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (ca. 1615-1617), went up for auction in Paris. It broke the new record even more dramatically than the 2014 sale had broken the 1998 record, selling for €2,360,600 ($2,775,000).

Well, we can kiss that record goodbye too, because less than a year later, the dealer who acquired Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria has sold it to London’s National Gallery for £3.6 million ($4,784,000). Paying this eye-watering price was made possible by donations from the American Friends of the National Gallery, the National Gallery Trust, Art Fund, Lord and Lady Sassoon, Lady Getty, Hannah Rothschild CBE, and others who prefer to remain anonymous.

It is the first work by a female artist bought by the National Gallery in almost 30 years, and is only the 21st painting by a woman to join the 2,300 works in the NG’s permanent collection. It’s also just the third easel painting by Artemisia Gentileschi in England.

Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria depicts the saint turned toward the viewer. The figure is identifiable as the saint because of the spiked wheel on which she rests her left hand, the means by which Saint Catherine was supposed to be martyred in the 4th century by order of the Emperor Maxentius only for it to break the moment she touched it. He ordered her beheaded instead and that one did the trick. Unique for her time, Artemisia crops the scene very tightly around the upper body of the saint. This is something you see repeatedly in her portraits of herself as other people.

Letizia Treves, The James and Sarah Sassoon Curator of Later Italian, Spanish, and French 17th-century paintings at the National Gallery say:

“Artemisia is without question one of the most celebrated painters of her time, and we have long wished to acquire a painting by her for the national collection. The fact that this is a self-portrait adds enormously to the painting’s appeal and art historical significance. We are fortunate to have one of the strongest collections of Italian Baroque paintings but, with the exception of Caravaggio, no Italian artist of the 17th century surpasses Artemisia in terms of fame and popular appeal. Following conservation treatment and reframing Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria will find a natural home alongside other works by Italian Baroque painters, including Caravaggio and Artemisia’s father Orazio Gentileschi.”

Roman inscription found in Thracian city

Ancient

An intact Latin inscription has been unearthed in an excavation of the ancient Thracian city of Kabyle near modern-day Kabile in southeastern Bulgaria. It is the first complete Roman inscription discovered in Kabyle in 35 years, a notable gap in a city that had a strong Roman presence from its conquest in 71 B.C. until the Gothic invasions of the 4th century.

The marble slab engraved with the inscription is two feet high by 2.6 feet wide. The seven lines of Latin inscribed on the slab refer to the construction of the public baths between 166 and 169 A.D., during the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180 A.D.).

The Kabyle thermae were built by the Cohors II Lucensium (Second Lucensian Cohort), Roman military unit based in the Thracian city at the time. The unit was commanded by prefect (praefectus) named Elius Rufus.

The stone slab itself has been found near the principia (plural of principium), the building for the command staff of the respective Roman military unit.

“All in all, the inscription’s translation reveals that the thermae in Kabyle were built by the Cohors II Lucensium (Second Lucensian Cohort) at the time when the Thracia province was governed by Governor Claudius Marcialus,” Bakardzhiev has told the BNT TV channel.

Before the discovery of the slab, archaeologists didn’t know anything about the Second Lucensian other than that it arrived in Kabyle in 136 A.D. The inscription confirmed not only that the Second Lucensian built the baths under the command of Elius Rufus, but that the site of excavation was in fact the cohort’s principia.

This is only the fourth inscription found in Kabyle that provides concrete information about Roman building projects in the city. The baths, one of the most extensive public structures built in Roman Kabyle, didn’t even have a clear date of construction until the discovery of the inscription.