The hull of the ship was salvaged from the sea floor and sent to Texas A&M’s Nautical Archaeology Program where they kicked off its conservation with a decade-long soaking in polyethylene glycol (PEG), a polymer that replaces the water in wood ensuring it doesn’t warp or shrink when it dries.

The problem with this method, which has been used to preserve ships from the Mary Rose to the Vasa, is that it takes a long time to work. More recently, a new problem has arisen: the price of petroleum-based products like PEG has skyrocketed. The original estimate for La Belle’s wood stabilization was $330,000. They had to increase it to $1.4 million solely because of the rising cost of PEG.

That’s when a little ingenuity and Texan affinity for a) large things, and b) cattle came to the rescue. Texas A&M is going to use a gigantic freeze dryer more commonly used to freeze dry several whole cows at a time to freeze dry the hull all at once.

The massive freeze dryer, at 40 feet long with an 8-foot internal diameter, is the largest such machine for conservation use in the hemisphere, says Peter Fix, the maritime center’s assistant director and project conservator for the La Belle.[...]

“We will take a piece of the ship, make a mold for each piece of timber to accurately mimic the curvature of the hull, put it in the freeze dryer and in four to six months, the freeze-drying process will slowly sublimate the water from the timber,” says Fix. “It’s a much gentler process than straight dehydration, and it is slightly revolutionary in that no one has tried it before. An awful lot of engineering and understanding of the complex shapes of the ship have to be compensated for in advance of freeze-drying.”

Donny Hamilton, head of the university’s anthropology department, says the new method will reduce the preservation time by about three years and cut the costs by more than a half million dollars.

The university hopes to amortize the half million dollar cost of the freeze drier by using it for future preservation projects, both historical and in response to disasters like floods. Once the ship comes out of the freeze dryer, it will be kept in storage until the museum’s reconstruction in 2013. The new museum will not only have La Belle on display, but also many of the million or so individual artifacts recovered from the wreck site.

La Salle wanted to start a French colony at the mouth of the Mississippi which would be well-positioned to steal Spanish silver. (It’s amazing how many Europeans came to North America specifically to pirate Spanish loot.) Unfortunately, he had no real idea of where the mouth of the Mississippi actually was, and he didn’t know how to navigate the tricky Gulf currents or the restless natives. When he arrived at what is now Matagorda Bay on the southeast Texas coast in 1685, he was 400 miles west of the Mississippi.

First his storeship, L’Aimable, ran aground, then La Belle (onto which they had transferred all the contents of L’Aimable they could salvage) sank. La Salle and the few remaining colonists founded what is now Victoria, Texas. They went North several times, still looking for the mouth of the Mississippi until finally La Salle’s 36 men mutinied and killed him in 1687. The mutineers stayed where they were, in present-day Navasota, Texas, for a year. In 1688, the 20 adults still surviving were killed by Indians.

It’s the only Roman lamp of its kind ever found in the UK. The British Museum has some fragments of similar lamps, but the only other place a lamp so complete has been uncovered is in Pompeii.

Conservator at Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Emma Hogarth, who restored the object said it is a rare and exquisite example of craftsmanship.[...]

The lantern resembles a modern hurricane lamp and the naked flame would have been protected by a thin sheet of horn — now decomposed — that had been scraped until it was translucent.

“What is particularly amazing about the lantern is that the chains it was suspended from still look and move like any modern chain and had not corroded into a metal lump,” said Hogarth.

The lamp dates to between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D. Suffolk had a number of wealthy villas in the 2nd century. The quality of the lantern suggests that it may have come from one of them.

And now in an even rarer treat, here’s some video taken of the find on the day of the rally:

Here’s the famous bow so goofily captured by James “King of the World” Cameron (in real life passengers weren’t allowed anywhere near the bow):

Amazing, isn’t it? That footage was taken at 3820 meters under the sea. The 3DHD technology takes much sharper pictures even at murky depths, and although we don’t get to see the full impact like the team members did when they got to view the complete footage with 3D glasses, the colors and definition are astonishing.

The expedition website is already packed with new footage, pictures and a Flash-based map you can click and drag around to explore the wreck and debris field. Click on everything, seriously, because it’s all fascinating.

I think my favorite may be Captain Smith’s stateroom, because you can see his bathtub through the collapsed walls. When Titanic was first discovered in 1985, the Captain’s stateroom was in fairly solid condition. Over the past 25 years, corrosion has buckled the walls and is beginning to eat away at the roof.

Biodegredation is a major concern. Colonies of microorganisms have been actively gnoshing on Titanic’s iron, producing long ribbons of digested metal called rusticles (like icicles only made out of rust). It seems very likely at this point that the different floors in the stern of the ship, the part of the wreck with the greatest bacterial activity, will sooner or later fully collapse onto each other. The iron in the stern was put under the greatest amount of stress during the sinking of the Titanic which makes it more susceptible to rusticle formation now, and all food was stored there, which experts think may have acted as lure and sustenance for microbes.

That’s what makes this project so important. We’ll not only have a detail-rich big picture of Titanic’s current condition, but we’ll have a greater understanding of the wreck’s long-term prospects.

RMS Titanic’s Facebook page is another rich source of pictures and minute-to-minute information about the project.

“I saw water dripping from the painting for an hour” after the fire at an adjacent construction site was put out late on Sunday, the head of Venice’s museum agency Vittorio Sgarbi told AFP, adding that he rushed to the scene after seeing the fire while dining at a nearby restaurant.

Workers have erected scaffolding to inspect the damaged “David and Goliath” along with two other Titians that look down from the ceiling of Santa Maria della Salute’s vestry.

“The painting might have experienced some alteration, but nothing that can’t be restored,” said Sgarbi, a well-known art critic.

David and Goliath was restored 20 years ago. It’s that recent restoration work that is most likely to have been affected by the water. Restorers nowadays use “reversible” colors to ensure that they don’t fall into the trap of past restorations that ended up materially altering the original canvas. That makes them easy to remove in case they’ve made a mistake without needing to use any harsh solvents that might damage the original brushstrokes. That also makes them more susceptible to external elements like, oh, say, gallons of water from firefighter hoses, but by design they’re easy to repair so that’s why Sgarbi doesn’t sound too upset.

There are several other Titian paintings in the vestry of the basilica (8 tondi of the Doctors of the Church and the Evangelists) which may have been damaged when the sprinkler system went off in response to the fire next door. Any damage that may have occurred isn’t immediately obvious. They will all be carefully examined and repaired as necessary.

Santa Maria della Salute (Saint Mary of Health) was built in 1631 as a votive offering to the Virgin Mary, considered the protector of the Venetian Republic, to end the devastating plague of 1630.

What I didn’t know is that she invented so many other things that we now take so much for granted that we don’t even think of them as having been invented, really. Things introduced to the world of high fashion by Elsa Schiaparelli include: square shoulders combined with nipped-in waistlines, wacky prints, graphic patterned sweaters, jackets to wear with evening gowns, the long runway walked by tall, thin models, ready-to-wear boutiques for couturiers, sportswear mix-and-match separates, colored zippers, the wrap dress, the skort, man-made fabrics and the wedge heel.

Schiaparelli’s couture house closed in 1954. She wasn’t able to roll with the post-war times despite having been at her most brilliant in the interwar period. That same year saw the rebirth of the signature line of her greatest rival, Coco Chanel. Chanel, who had kept under the radar since her couture house closed after the German occupation of France (she had been a Nazi officer’s mistress and was not exactly beloved in France after the war despite her own innovations and contributions to French fashion), would come to eclipse Schiaparelli in popular reputation, although not among couturiers many of whom have borrowed liberally from Elsa’s artistic genius over the decades.

If you’re at all interested in fashion history, or even just like looking at purty dresses, take a romp through these galleries: Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2004 exhibit, “Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli,” and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s awesome interactive timeline of the Golden Age of couture, which does an excellent job showing the links between famous couturiers, so many of whom started as cutters and pattern-makers under other famous couturiers.

ETA: Rowan pointed me to this article on a new exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on the history of European fashion from 1700 to 1915. It opens on October 2nd and runs until March 6th. Meanwhile, here’s a photo gallery of some of the gloriousness. I’m completely in love with this dress from England, around 1885.