Month: May 2022

Como Treasure: 1,000 gold coins in a cooking pot

Ancient, Treasures

The hoard of gold coins from the last days of the Western Roman Empire that was discovered under an old theater in Como in 2018 has proven even more exceptional than it seemed at first glance. And that’s saying a lot, because from the lidded soapstone pot to the tidy stacks of mint-condition 5th century gold coins inside of it, this find was immediately recognized as one of unprecedented historical significance. 

When the news of the spectacular find was announced in September of 2018, archaeologists had recovered the vessel and begun the process of excavating it in laboratory conditions. They had removed 27 coins from the reigns of the Emperors Honorius (r. 384–423), Valentinian III (r. 425-455), Leo I the Thracian (r. 457-474) and his short-lived co-emperor Libius Severus (r. 461-465) and estimated there were about 300 in the whole hoard. They had come across one gold ingot and two objects of undetermined identity and expected to find more in the densely packed amphora.

Well, the painstaking process of removing one coin at a time from its tight, tidy stacks is now complete, and the final tally of gold coins is 1,000. Exactly 1,000. Someone had to have counted this out for professional purposes, like an accountant, government administrator or imperial goldsmith. The vast majority of the coins — 639 of them — were struck by mint in Mediolanum (modern-day Milan) which was then the capital of the Western Empire. They were minted between 395 and 472 A.D. and bear representations of eight emperors and four empresses. The fall of the Western Roman Empire is traditionally dated to the deposition of Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476 A.D., and 744 of the coins were minted after 455, so literally the last two decades of the empire.

In addition to the coins, the treasure contains the raw materials for and products of the highest quality goldsmith work. There are three large gold rings, believed to be men’s rings, one octagonal, one set with a huge cabochon garnet of superb quality, and one with an unusually intricate combination of basket weave and filigree techniques. There also are three earrings (one pair and an unfinished singleton). The production side of the business is attested to by an ingot, a gold bar, and thin gold threads. The ingot is alloyed with silver to make it more durable for jewelry and it has been cut and broken from bits of being used to make precious objects.

All told, there are 11 pounds of gold in this hoard, an almost inconceivable amount of portable wealth at a time when the imperial economic systems were moribund. The amphora it was crammed into, on the other hand, was a modest object of everyday use. It’s a jug not dissimilar to a beer stein that was locally produced of green soapstone. It has char marks indicating it was used in cooking. Pliny referred to cooking vessels being made of soapstone in the Como area (Natural History, XXXVIL 44), and they are still manufactured there today.

This video shows the jug and goldsmith materials, including a fantastic close-up of the garnet.

This video focuses on the jug, but around the 3:40 mark you can see the coins being removed one at a time with tweezers during the conservation process.

Mary, Queen of Scots’ silver casket of doom

Renaissance

A luxurious silver casket believed to have contained the scandalous letters from Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Earl of Bothwell that were the pretext for her forced abdication and long imprisonment has been acquired by National Museums Scotland. £1.8 million

The casket was made in Paris between 1493 and 1510, which makes it an extremely rare survival of luxury Renaissance French silversmithing, much of which was melted down in the late 17th century by Louis XIV to fund his endless wars. There are no other French silver caskets of this type and quality known to survive. This one just happened to have left the country a century earlier, and its association with Mary, Queen of Scots is likely a large part of the reason it was preserved so well for so long.

As the experts on Antiques Roadshow always tell people to do, a note kept with the casket explains its connection to Mary. Written in the early 1700s, the note states that the casket was owned by Mary, Marchioness of Douglas, who sold it to Anne, Duchess of Hamilton. Mary told Anne that it once belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots.

Eight letters purportedly written by Mary, Queen of Scots, were the crux of the case made for her deposition by the Earl of Moray and other Confederate Lords. The letters, they claimed, proved she had had an illicit affair with the Earl of Bothwell and had conspired with him to kill the Queen’s husband Lord Darnley. The letters proved no such thing and there’s a strong chance they were forgeries anyway, but the pretext worked. Mary was forced to abdicate and fled to England seeking the protection of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I. Instead, Elizabeth ordered an investigation into whether Mary had indeed murdered Darnley and although the inquiry was inconclusive, Mary was held captive in a sequence of castles for 19 years until 1586 when she was tried and executed for plotting to overthrow Elizabeth.

The letters and casket went to a round-robin of Scottish lords after that. Moray, regent of Scotland after Mary’s convenient removal, had the letters for a while, then James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton. Mary’s son, the future James VI, is believed to have destroyed the original letters in 1584. Only a few copies exist today.

The casket was acquired by Mary Gordon, second wife to the 1st Marquis of Douglas, in the 1630s. Whether it is the actual casket that contained the letters used against Mary is unknown, but it such a high-end piece it is entirely plausible that it belonged to her at some point.

This ornate object was made by an extremely skilled goldsmith. We can tell that the goldsmith was in Paris from two maker’s marks stamped into its external underside panel. They have a crowned fleur-de-lis identifying the casket as Parisian, which sits above two symbols for the specific goldsmith, a fire steel or strike-a-light with a small Greek-type cross beneath it. After 1506, the French king Louis XII ordered the Parisian goldsmiths to start using a new type of mark, which means the casket must have been made by this time.

The decoration on the lid is known as ‘strapwork’, with alternating wide bands of three-dimensional scrolling leaves and flowers, and narrower, flat bands of flowerlets. The decoration of the sides is very different, with pinpricked flowers, birds, a rabbit, and a running stag and dog. This work may have been done later, and further scientific work will attempt to see if it replaced a previous design.

On one side is an engraving of the arms of the Dukes of Hamilton, with their distinctive symbol of the birlinn, or galley, in the second and third quarters. Three cinquefoils appear in the first and fourth quarters. When magnified, you can see that these arms have replaced something that has been erased. According to the provenance note, these were the arms of the Marquis of Douglas, and before that, of Mary, Queen of Scots.

The casket is now on display in the National Museums Scotland’s Hawthornden Court. In August it will be moved to its permanent location in the Kingdom of the Scots gallery where other artifacts and documents connected with Mary are displayed.

Indigenous graves found on Taiwan campus

Modern(ish)

Construction of new facilities at National Ilan University in Yilan County, Taiwan, has unearthed skeletal remains and grave goods from three 17th century burials. Artifacts include fish-shaped metal braids known as golden carps, gilded glass beads, copper bells, and copper bangles. The bones are very poorly preserved, but the artifacts identify the individuals as members of the Kavalan culture, an indigenous people of Taiwan.

The Kavalan first appear on the historical record in 1632 after an encounter with Spanish sailors blown off course in a typhoon. The Dutch East India Company made additional contact in 1650 and later the Spanish attempted to establish a colony there, but the Kavalan remained resistant to external influence and assimilation, retaining their unique cultural traditions and their ancestral territory until the 19th century. After at least one failed attempt, the Han Chinese managed to settle the area in 1796 and began to displace the Kavalan.

The Qing dynasty forwent the settlement part and skipped straight to invasion in the 1870s. After the Kavalan and their allies the Sakizaya people were defeated in battle in 1878, the Qing retaliated against their uprising by decimating both populations. They were so dispersed and reduced in numbers that the Kavalan even lost their own tribal identification until a campaign of rectification restored their status as a Taiwan indigenous group in 2002. Today there are an estimated 1,500 members of the Kavalan tribe.

The graves were found on May 10th after a preliminary exploration of an area on campus where an addition to the College of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science was being built. Once they were confirmed to be archaeological remains, construction was suspended to make way for an archaeological excavation through September.

The find is likely connected to the “Old Baili Village” (Bai Li Jiu She), an as-yet-undiscovered Kavalan settlement that has been mentioned in written and oral sources, [the university’s statement] said.

It is not the first time that objects of archeological value were found on the university’s campus, [the university] said.

A trove of artifacts linked to the Shihsanhang settlement was discovered when ground was broken for the school in 1926, while seven skeletons, three fish-shaped metal knots and other trinkets were separately unearthed by construction workers in 2000 and 2006, [the university] said.

The site is uniquely rich in Kavalan archaeology and the only university campus in Taiwan to be listed as an archaeological site. National Ilan University plans to build a museum to collect, conserve and display the archaeological finds to bring attention to the history of the Kavalan people at the site.

Gummi bears turn 100 years old

Modern(ish)

Confectioner Hans Riegel founded Haribo (combining the first letters of his name and hometown of Bonn) in 1920. The first production plant was a copper kettle in his kitchen and his first employee was his wife Gertrud. He’d make hard candies and she’d deliver them on her bicycle. In 1922, Riegel invented a new confection: the Tanzbären, or Dancing Bear. It was a soft fruit-flavored candy shaped like a bear sitting on its hind legs, inspired by the sad performing bears that were so popular at the time.

At 1.5 inches tall, the original gummi bears were bigger than the familiar form they take today, and they were tougher to the bite because they were made of gum arabic instead of gelatine. While jelly-style candies — gumdrops, Turkish delight — had been around a long time, Riegel’s innovation produced a chewier, firmer texture and the playful animal shapes appealed to kids raised on teddy bears which had exploded onto the global scene as the toy to have in 1903 after Teddy Roosevelt refused to kill a bear in an unsporting matter and a toymaker made a velvet plushie bear in his honor. The German toy company Steiff started making teddy bears at the same time, independently of the US trend, and they were instantly popular. When the little bears came out in candy form for just 1 Pfennig apiece, they were instantly popular too.

They soon outgrew their kitchen and moved operations to a production factory. The original Tanzbären shape was retired in the 1930s in favor of the Teddy-Bären which were smaller and cuter. Naturally they sold like crazy and by the beginning of World War II, Riegel had gone from selling tall bears in market kiosks to running a confectionary factory with more than 400 employees cranking out ten tons of candy each day.

The company managed to hang on by the skin of its teeth through the war years, but just barely. Hans died in 1945 at the young age of 52 and Hans’ sons had fought for Germany and been taken prisoner by the Allied forces. Gertrud ran the skeleton operation until her sons returned in 1946 to pick up where they left off. By 1950, there were 1,000 employees. Hans Jr. was the one who came up with the “Kids and grown-ups love it so, the happy world of Haribo!” slogan, still very much in use in commercials today.

Hans Jr. and his brother Paul kept tweaking the product, continuing over the decades to introduce ever smaller and cuter bears. They were squishier too, their appealing softness a lure for unsuspecting children. The Goldbären gummi bear as it lives and breathes today was first sold in 1975.

Haribo is celebrating the centenary with a bunch of limited edition flavors (meh) and party hat-shaped gummies (double meh). I think they need to bring back the legacy recipe, al dente gum arabic and all. Team Tanzbären!

Young Knight shines again in complex landscape

Museums, Renaissance

Young Knight in a Landscape (c. 1505) by Vittore Carpaccio is one of the most iconic masterpieces of the many masterpieces of Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. A comprehensive new study and restoration program undertaken in public view in 2020 and through March of 2021 has removed yellowed varnish and muddied overpainting to reveal the original rich colors of this uniquely complex symbolic landscape. The painting is now part of a special exhibition dedicated to the work, its imagery and the restoration itself.

The large-scale painting depicts a young man in plate armour drawing or sheathing his sword. His red hose show under the armor strapped to his right leg. He stands on a path bordered by a variety of plants. A snow-white ermine is in the glad on the left. Behind him the walls of a city extend to the vanishing point, overlooking a body of water. Animals — rabbits, deer, dogs, a veritable conference of the birds — abound on land, sea and sky.

In the left middle ground immediately behind the knight, a second one emerges from a dilapidated fortress. Mounted on a dun steed, he complements the central subject with his yellow and black checkered livery that matches the standing knight’s shoes, barely visible shadows underneath his chain mail. The mounted knight is armed with pieces the standing knight doesn’t have — a pike, a helmet with visor — and a peacock is perched on his helmet.

The work contains a wide range of symbolic elements, each of which has significance and meaning: the fauna, flora, landscape, figures, all transmit an interconnected message. Each detail is located in a strategic position within the composition in order to create a narrative associated with the virtues and deeds attributed to the figure and in order to exalt his memory. Like the lance that the mounted knight holds and points towards a falcon (symbol of vision, strategy, knowledge and victory) perched on a branch at the upper right corner. In turn, this imaginary line connects with the dog that accompanies the knight and is a symbol of fidelity and sacrifice. Other “lines” radiating from the falcon link the principal figure with different details among the many to be found in this work. The result is an invisible network of lines that connects all these elements to the principal figure, forming a grid in which he appears to be trapped and thus involved in this tension.

The figure of the young knight is made up of two opposing halves: the upper half – clad in Italianate armour with simple rivets and motifs of feathers or scales on the arm guards and gorget – is shown as resigned and melancholy while the lower half, with floral motifs decorating the different parts of the German-style armour, is shown as decided and arrogant. The knight’s sword divides these two parts of the figure, a duality that is repeated throughout the painting and which refers to the opposition of good and evil, victory and defeat, the heavenly and the earthly realms.

Some scholars believe it to be a portrait of a real person rather than a pure allegory. If it is a true portrait, it would be the oldest full-length portrait known. One possible candidate proposed by the museum is Venetian naval captain Marco Gabriel, who fought Ottoman forces in the siege of Modone (a strategically important port in the Peloponnese) in 1500. He was captured and executed when the Ottomans took the city.

This hypothesis explains the presence of the walled city in the painting, which is possibly an idealised version of the fortress, as well as the destroyed building on the left of the composition from which a rider emerges; a young knight mounted on a dark charger (symbol of inner wisdom and death), accompanied by his faithful dog in an allegorical image of the knight’s soul embarking on its path towards rebirth. According to this theory, this journey is also symbolised in the trees on the other side of the scene: a leafy oak in the background, its autumnal version in the middle ground and a cut-down tree next to the principal figure from which new shoots are growing and which has a cartouche with the name of the artist and the painting’s date.

This cartouche was rediscovered underneath old overpaints during cleaning in 1958, as was the one with the inscription “Mal mori quam foedari” (Rather dead than dishonoured), rediscovered next to the ermine. 

The motto next to the stoat in his winter white fur suggests the knight may have been a member of the chivalric Order of the Ermine, an honor conferred by the Dukes (and Duchess Anne) of Brittany who had stylized black-tipped ermine tails in their coat of arms. 

The museum has created an excellent video about the restoration and technical study of the painting. Visitors to the museum will be able to enjoy that video next to the portrait in the new exhibition, but the rest of us will have to make do with YouTube and the museum’s magnificent gigapixel image of Young Knight in a Landscape which puts you eye-to-beady-eye with the ermine.