The History Blog

They stuffed their condoms in newspapers and carried them around campus. You know, just in case.

Librarians at the University of Salamanca were cataloguing the library’s historical books when they came across a 16th c. medical manual. A newspaper was found folded inside the manual, and inside the newspapers were two condoms.

Made from pork tripe and with a blue string at the open end to minimise spillage, they were actually found inside a newspaper dating from 1857, and probably left behind by a medical student.

I’m finding it difficult to imagine some poor guy having to tie a blue ribbon ’round the ol’ oak tree at the crucial moment. And I thought opening the package was a buzzkill. We’ve got it easy in every way, don’t we?

I don’t know why but I seem to be on a pretty rocks kick lately. Today’s are brought to you by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit of “pietre dure”, literally hard rocks, a decorative inlay technique using semi-precious hardstones like lapis lazuli and alabaster.

The exhibit has been a sleeper hit for the Met, probably on account of the jaw-dropping beauty of the artifacts.

At the show’s heart is the constantly shifting use of stone, especially the flat pietre dure. Sometimes stone is exploited for its own fabulous color and texture, as in the bold geometric tabletops of papal Rome or a Venetian cabinet that is really more a rock-solid architectural model than it is furniture.

Sometimes delicacy prevailed, especially in pictorially inclined Florence. There, the stones’ textures, colors, shadings and inherent light were extensively micromanaged into descriptive schemes that often challenge painting. Examples include the fabulously accurate undergrowth of grape vines, butterflies and birds on a table with Eucharistic symbols, and a tiny austere landscape in which single pieces of lapis and agate form sky and hills. Inlaid details like a white church and green poplars sharpen the implicit spatial recession.

But the sentimental favorite has to be this amazingly realistic painting-like piece of the piazza in which I spent so many happy hours of my wayward youth:

Is that not a stunner? The craftsmanship, the eye for texture and color it takes to even see the possibility of something like this in a collection of rocks, just boggles my mind.

On the edge of the Gobi desert in Western China outside the ancient Silk Road city of Dunhuang is a cliff face bored with hundreds of Buddhist grottoes carved out of the rock face. They’re called Mogaoku (”peerless caves”) and they are packed with unbelievably gorgeous frescoes and sculptures ranging in date from the 5th to the 14th centuries.

The caves started as hermit habitats, simple holes carved into the sandstone, but by 50 years after the first monk made himself a rock home in 366 A.D., the caves flourished in number and decor.

Larger and larger grottoes were excavated as temples and monastic lecture halls: essentially, public spaces. Many had chapel-like niches and free-standing walk-around altars, all cut from stone. As with the Ajanta Buddhist caves in India, interiors were carved with architectural features — beams, eaves, pitched roofs, coffered ceiling — as if to simulate buildings.

Painting covered everything. Murals illustrating jatakas, tales from the Buddha’s past lives, were popular; they’re like panoramic comic-book storyboards spread across a wall. For imperially commissioned interiors, images of princeling saints and court fetes were the rule. Rock ceilings were covered with fields of decorative patterning to evoke an illusion of fabric pavilions. Any leftover space was filled with figures of tiny deities — Mogaoku was known as the Thousand Buddha Caves — painted directly on the plastered walls or stuck on as sculptural plaques. […]

Of the 800 or so caves created here from the 5th to 14th centuries, nearly half had some form of decoration. What survives adds up to a developmental timeline of Buddhist art in China, an encyclopedic archive of styles and ideas, of dashes forward and retreats to the past.

So of course it’s in danger of destruction. We have the usual story of scholars/looters stripping hunks off the wall for their hometown museum. Then there’s the desert sand: nature’s most reliable abrasive. Then there are the crowds of people since the site was opened to tourism since 1980, exuding moisture and carbon dioxide.

Plans for drastic remedial action are in place. Under Dr. Fan and the vice director, Wang Xudong, the academy will build by 2011 a new visitor reception center several miles from the caves, near the airport and railroad station. All Mogaoku-bound travelers will be required to go to the center first, where they will be given an immersive introduction to the caves’ history, digital tours of interiors and simulated restorations on film of damaged images. They will then be shuttled to the site itself, where they will take in the ambience of its desert-edge locale and see the insides of one or two caves before returning to where they started.

It’s not the familiar model of Western tourism, to be sure, but I think it’s quite brilliant. If site preservation requires draconian measures, then draconian measures there should be. They could have closed the caves. Hell, they still might have to is this doesn’t work.

Be sure to check out the slide show on the article because there isn’t one picture I didn’t want to post. The art is just astonishingly gorgeous.

The Uffizi Gallery in Florence will be restoring sculptures in public, starting with Baccio Bandinelli’s 16th c. copy of the famous second century B.C. Greek Laocoön group.

During the “open air restoration”, which will take place behind clear plastic screens, the public can see how restorers use laser technology and deionised water to remove fatty substances, old layers of wax and dust deposits from the priceless sculptures.

Experts will also check the structural strength of the works, paying special attention to repairs done in the past following a fire in the Uffizi in 1762.

As if the Uffizi weren’t interesting enough to visit. Now it’s like an action museum!

Other works slated for restoration as a spectator sport include a Roman statue of Hercules at the end of his labours, two first century Roman busts of unnamed elderly gents, and the marble “Cinghiale” (aka wild boar) which was the model for the bronze “Porcellino” (aka piglet) that has become a symbol of Florence.

The city of Petra in Jordan is a famous remnant of the Nabateans, a wealthy trading people who controlled oases from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. The buildings carved into beautiful rose-colored rockfaces were famous even before they hosted the crusader knight with the Holy Grail in the third Indiana Jones movie.

There’s another Nabatean city with amazing rock carving, though, that I found about only today because UNESCO just added it to its World Heritage List. It’s called Al-Hijr, and it’s the first site in Saudi Arabia to make the list.

Formerly known as Hegra it is the largest conserved site of the civilization of the Nabataeans south of Petra in Jordan. It features well preserved monumental tombs with decorated facades dating from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD. The site also features some 50 inscriptions of the pre-Nabataean period and some cave drawings. Al-Hijr bears a unique testimony to Nabataean civilization. With its 111 monumental tombs, 94 of which are decorated, and water wells, the site is an outstanding example of the Nabataeans’ architectural accomplishment and hydraulic expertise.

It’s a rostrum. The Romans used to affix them to the prow of their ship to batter the sides of enemy vessels.

This particular rostrum was found off the coast of Sicily and seems to have been used in the last naval battle of the First Punic War against Carthage. (The first one was the one without Hannibal and his elephants.)

The ram was attached to the bow of a ship that was used in a 241 B.C. skirmish called the Battle of the Egadi Islands, off a body of water that has been a shipping pathway dating back to the time of the Roman Empire. The Romans traveled the waterway on their way to and from North Africa, Royal said.

The Battle of Egadi Islands pitted 200 Roman ships against 100 Carthaginian ships. The battle was one of the last of the first Punic War and led to the Carthaginian’s surrender, Royal said.

I don’t know how the archaeologists made this determination, but it’s a majorly big deal to find a rostrum in the first place (only 4 others are known) and completely unique that it can be traced to a specific battle.

I pictured them shaped like rams heads, thanks to excessive consumption of Hollywood sword-and-sandal cinemascope epics, but instead they’re rather pointy and scary and eminently well-adapted to their function.

The Italian government has declared Pompeii, the Roman town destroyed once by the eruption of Vesuvius and now again by 250 years of crappy excavation/looting/tourist hoards, in a state of emergency.

Archaeologists and art historians have long complained about the poor upkeep of Pompeii, dogged by lack of investment, mismanagement, litter and looting. Bogus tour guides, illegal parking attendants and stray dogs also plague visitors. […]

The “state of emergency”, which the government said would last for a year, allows for extra funds and special measures to be taken to protect the site.

“Every year at least 150 square metres of fresco and plaster work are lost for lack of maintenance,” Antonio Irlando, a regional councillor responsible for artistic heritage, told the newspaper.

“The same goes for stones: at least 3,000 pieces every year end up disintegrating,” he said.

A third of the town is still underground, lucky bugger. Had it been excavated it would be as hosed as the rest of the site, and it can’t be excavated because it is currently covered by garbage from Naples, currently mired in a refuse crisis.

I’ve been reading a book about Pompeii over the past week, a lovely glossy book with all the latest finds and gorgeous pictures. It’s amazing how often they describe something that was excavated years ago and now only exists in some Grand Tour watercolors and journals, or described in 100-year-old books.

Here’s an example to chill your bones. To the left is a painting of a wall fresco of Venus from when it was found in the House of the Vestal Virgins in the 18th century. On the right is what is left of that wall fresco today.

Like a kick in the groin, ain’t it?

Don’t even get me started on that bastard Charles III, Bourbon king of Naples and Spain, who brutally mined the site for his personal collection after its rediscovery in 1748, even going so far as to knock down frescoed walls that were not deemed good enough to steal for his personal museum.

Pompeii has been looted pretty much non-stop since that day, and earlier by locals who knew where it was. Even as I type someone is tunneling in with a chisel and stripping entire walls of frescoes off to sell to art dealer pieces of shit like Giacomo Medici and Bob Hecht, may they rot in jail for seculum seculorum amen.

Here’s hoping the extra money this state of emergency declaration brings with it will help stem the tide of destruction. I can’t say I’m hugely optimistic at this point.

(For more on the neato photomontage above, visit Pompeii - A Different Perspective.)

Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, the silent movie set in a dystopic future of proletarian exploitation, Art Deco glamour and evil robot babes, is considered a pioneering masterpiece nowadays, but it bombed so hard when it was first released in 1927 that the studio edited out half the film to try to improve its mass appeal.

For years film historians have tried to patch together a full version as Lang originally produced it, but could never find a complete copy of the long film. Other bits and bobs have turned up over the years, but a full quarter of the picture remained missing.

Until now.

Adolfo Z. Wilson, a man from Buenos Aires and head of the Terra film distribution company, arranged for a copy of the long version of “Metropolis” to be sent to Argentina in 1928 to show it in cinemas there.

Shortly afterwards a film critic called Manuel Peña Rodríguez came into possession of the reels and added them to his private collection. In the 1960s Peña Rodríguez sold the film reels to Argentina’s National Art Fund – clearly nobody had yet realised the value of the reels.

A copy of these reels passed into the collection of the Museo del Cine (Cinema Museum) in Buenos Aires in 1992, the curatorship of which was taken over by Paula Félix-Didier in January this year. Her ex-husband, director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art, first entertained the decisive suspicion: He had heard from the manager of a cinema club, who years before had been surprised by how long a screening of this film had taken.

Together, Paula Félix-Didier and her ex-husband took a look at the film in her archive – and discovered the missing scenes.

They contacted the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation — the holders of the rights to “Metropolis” — and director Helmut Possmann confirmed without reservation the authenticity of the recovered footage.

“We’re not being fooled,” he said. “The film can now be shown more or less as Lang originally intended it. In terms of understanding what it’s about, we’ll be seeing a new film.”

Although estimates of its original length vary depending on the speed at which it is shown, Possmann said “Metropolis” was conceived as a film lasting just over 2-1/2 hours.

Around 20 to 25 minutes of footage that fleshes out secondary characters and sheds light on the plot would be added to the film pending restoration, he added. But around 5 minutes of the original were probably still missing, he said.

We won’t know how much footage is actually recoverable until it’s restored, which could take years. By then I’ll have Blu-Ray so I won’t mind having to replace the sweet version I currently have on DVD.

Here’s a still from the press conference where you can see a scratchy but entirely viewable frame of the newly discovered footage. It’s a scene between the capitalist magnate Fredersen and the mad scientist Rotwang.

So Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree and boldly refuse to cover it up, and it seems like the tales of his abject poverty were equally fictional.

In fact, he lived with his family in a spacious (for the time) 8 room, 1 1/2 story house. The house was demolished in the early 19th c., but archaeologists have found parts of the foundation, chimneys and stone-lined cellars, enough to determine the home’s original size and floorplan.

From sections of foundation stones, the bases of two chimneys and remains of four cellars, the archaeologists determined the dimensions of the main house, a rectangle 53 by 37 feet, not counting the separate kitchen. Other evidence from debris indicated that the house had a clapboard facade and wooden roof shingles.

Mark Wenger, an architectural historian for Ferry Farm, said the house appeared to have had a central hallway with front rooms and back rooms on each side and possibly three rooms upstairs under the slope of the roof. The front rooms faced on the river, which in those days was navigable to large sailing ships.

“It was a very nice gentry house,” Mr. Wenger said, at a time when most people made do with houses of only one or two rooms.

They found some groovy geegaws, too, like a pipe engraved with a Masonic symbol (Washington was a mason, so it might have been his) and wig curlers. He he… Washington put his wigs in curlers.

Happy Fourth of July!

Students from UCLA will be blogging about their experiences this summer on digs in fourteen locations in seven different countries: Albania, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and the U.S.

Undergraduates will blog from — among other places — the world’s richest collection of rock art, a mass burial site for people mentioned in the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and a tropical village possibly spotted by Christopher Columbus’ crew on his fourth voyage to the Americas. […]

The blogs are designed to showcase UCLA’s new field studies program, which this summer is taking 140 undergraduates to 13 different sites in 11 countries. Typically, archaeological digs are run with the help of professionals and graduate students. But participants in UCLA’s new field program are much less experienced. In fact, they aren’t necessarily archaeology or even anthropology majors — just students intrigued by archaeological fieldwork.

Lucky, lucky, lucky bastards. So lucky I can hardly stand it. Good thing they’ll be blogging about the digs so I can live vicariously through them.

The Albanian dig is my favorite. I mean, you can’t beat this with 20 sticks:

No less exciting will be John Papadopoulos’ dig in southwestern Albania, near the Adriatic coast. In 2004, the UCLA classics professor and his wife, Sarah Morris, also a UCLA classics professor, discovered the graves of 150 people they now believe to be Illyrians, neighbors of the ancient Greeks who were mentioned not only by Aristotle but also by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. By day, the students will learn to use GPS mapping technology and methods for classifying and conserving all kinds of artifacts, including delicate bronze crowns discovered in the graves of adolescent girls. At night, they will sleep among the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Apollonia, where the Roman Emperor Augustus attended a school of philosophy and his great uncle Julius Caesar was once stranded on the way to a key battle.

You can read a succulent description of a past student’s experience in this article in UCLA magazine. It sounds like an amazing program for anyone. Even graduate students don’t get this lucky often.

“In most field schools, students aren’t being treated well,” Boytner said. “They’re being treated as inexpensive labor, and there isn’t really any training.” Students leave those digs discouraged, feeling used, without learning proper techniques or even much about the site. That means fewer students became archaeologists — and even fewer become donors, he said.

Boytner, co-director of the Chile dig, used the Tarapaca Valley project as a pilot program. A packed schedule of field work and classes gives students a crash-course in the historical significance of the dig site, how and why to use different archaeological techniques, and instruction on lab work and complex field equipment. Working side by side with local archaeologists also exposes students to regional customs, like the pago. [A Chilean custom of asking the earth’s permission before digging by making an offering of wine.]

The blogs begin on July 7th. The site is password protected until then (lame), but I’ll remind you next week. Summer Digs.