Category: Museums

Rare Suffragette Christmas card donated to V&A

Modern(ish), Museums

A rare surviving Suffragette Christmas card found in Mold, Flintshire, has been donated to the Victoria & Albert Museum. The card was sold by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) around 1910 to raise money for its women’s suffrage activism. It reemerged at a WeBuyVintage roadshow event and valued at around £2,500.

Matt Case, senior antiques specialist at WeBuyVintage, said finding an original example was “incredibly exciting”.

He said: “These weren’t simply Christmas cards, they were pieces of political campaigning that helped fund one of the most significant social movements in British history.

“Because they were intended to be seasonal and disposable, very few have survived, especially in such good condition.”

Examples of this card with the original China dolls still attached are rare, and this one is a particularly fine example with the colors still vivid. A comparable card with more faded purple silk and green print and more staining on the paper sold at Bonhams London in 2024 for £2,816.

Christmas was a meaningful time for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the women-only militant activist organization created in 1906 by Emmeline Pankhurst with the goal of employing civil disobedience, direct action, confrontation with politicians and police, even arson, sabotage and property damage in their campaign for women’s suffrage. Founded in Manchester on October 10th, they organized a march to London on December 13th, to protest Parliament’s refusal to pass legislation enfranchising women. Several WSPU members were arrested in the protest. They refused to pay fines and were sentenced to two weeks in jail. Members of the WSPU protested again on December 20th, and another five were arrested. Twenty-one WSPU suffragists in total spent that Christmas under lock and key at Holloway Prison.

That did not stop the others from continuing their work, however. When the House adjourned to celebrate the holidays with their family, the WSPU were at the door giving MPs envelopes inscribed: “What a woman really wants for a Christmas box”. Inside the envelope was a slip of paper with “A vote” written on it.

When the arrested Suffragettes were released in January, a special Christmas dinner was arranged and when the next group was released a public welcome breakfast was held at Anderton’s Hotel in London. That became a yearly tradition.

The WSPU became adept at what we today would call branding. They designed a flag in purple, white and green in 1908, and used those colors in all of their campaign materials, publications, event tickets and fundraising merchandise, Christmas cards among them.

Fayum portrait Tondo of the Two Brothers restored

Ancient, Museums

The Tondo of the Two Brothers, one of the most striking and unusual Fayum mummy portraits, has been restored by a joint team of Egyptian and Italian conservators.

The 2,000-year-old portrait is one of hundreds of encaustic-on-wood panel paintings discovered at the Fayum necropolis southwest of Cairo. They are notable for the realism (albeit idealized in age and good looks) of the portraiture. Painted on wood then sealed with beeswax, the panels were placed over the face of the deceased and held in place with an intricate criss-cross wrapping of linen bandages.

This example is rare for its circular shape and depicts two young men standing side by side. While double portraits are known, they are less common than individual ones and this is especially rare being a double portrait on a round panel 62 cm (24 inches) in diameter.

The wood had suffered extensive damage from boring insects, likely termites, which caused parts of the painted figures to separate. An earlier intervention had also backfired, leaving fragments that were originally part of the mouth and chin of the figure on the right.

Conservators added support to the paint in the damaged areas and stabilized them with a lightweight filler matching the color of the wood. They also repaired displaced fragments, removing them, flattening them and reinforcing them before placing them back in their original locations with balsa wood supports. The treatment has left the painted surface more visually integrated and consistent. Ultrasound scans of the panel during the conservation process revealed an ancient darkening varnish was used in the hair of both men. This adds new information about how the portraits were made.

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), highlighted the portrait’s archaeological and artistic significance and the importance of its conservation. He explained that the work is exceptional not only for the quality and expressiveness of its painting, but also because its form, technique, and state of preservation provide valuable evidence for studying portraiture in Roman Egypt.

He noted that the conservation work required particular care because both the wooden support and the painted surface were fragile. Collaboration between conservators from the Egyptian Museum and their Italian counterparts also provided an opportunity for scientific and professional exchange. The team used a minimal-intervention approach that respected the portrait’s authenticity, restoring its visual coherence while preserving evidence of its long history.

The Tondo of the Two Brothers will now go on display in Rome, leaving Egypt for the first time to be the centerpiece of a new exhibition: The Power of the Portrait: Egypt and Rome, Faces of Fayum, which runs at the Ara Pacis Museum from November 5, 2026, to May 2, 2027. It will feature more than 110 objects, including 24 painted portraits, funerary shrouds, plaster portraits and jewelry.

“National treasure” coin identified in Mørstad Hoard

Medieval, Museums, Treasures

As the cataloguing of more than 5,000 coins in Norway’s largest Viking coin hoard proceeds apace, archaeologist Anne Skogsfjord has identified one of the rarest coins in the country: a silver penny issued by Olaf Haraldsson, aka Saint Olaf, patron saint of Norway. Fewer than 20 Olaf Haraldsson coins are known to survive today. There are only four of this type, three of them in Sweden. The only one discovered in Norway was found over a century ago in 1924.

The coin bears the king’s portrait facing left wearing a conical helmet. In front of the profile is a cross on three steps, known as a Golgotha cross, a symbol frequently found on Byzantine coins. The inscription reads ONLAF R+ NORMANORV (“Olaf, King of the Norwegians”). The reverse features a double cross. The inscription is worn in this example so the final letters are missing, but we know from other surviving coins struck from this die that the full inscription reads +CE DVX DOMINNVS MEI (“My leader, my lord”).

Three different issues of Olaf Haraldsson pennies are known, all of them modelled after Anglo-Saxon pennies struck under Cnut the Great around 1024–1030. This issue dates to 1024-1028, the waning years of the Viking Age. Olaf Haraldsson is credited with spreading Christianity in Norway, and as he was likely directly responsible for deciding how the coins would look, the iconographic themes and inscriptions confirm his emphasis on Christianization.

The Museum of Cultural History calls the discovery a sensation.

“This is a coin commemorating Christianisation on a grand scale. We can see how King Olaf uses the coinage to legitimise the new faith, and to legitimise himself as a Christian king of European standing,” says Gullbekk. […]

It probably changed hands several times during the 20–25 years it was in circulation before being buried at what is now the Mørstad farm in Eastern Norway. Researchers can see several traces of small cuts made with a knife on both sides of the coin. This was a way of checking the silver content during payments.

The Olaf coin will be one of the coins from the Mørstad Hoard that will be going on display for the first time in a new exhibition at the Museum of Cultural History on November 20th.

Rare Medici porcelain vases donated to Florence museum

Museums, Renaissance

Two rare Florentine vases from the 16th century made in the attempt to produce in Europe porcelain of like quality and type as that imported from China have been donated to the Museum of San Marco in Florence. They are two of only 60 to 70 surviving pieces manufactured in the Casino di San Marco complex, established by Grand Duke Francesco I de’ Medici. Today only one other example of Medici porcelain is in a Tuscan Culture Ministry institution, so the donation of two vases triples the number in public collections in their place of origin.

Manufactured between 1575 and 1585, both vases are white with blue decoration and feature striking serpentine handles.

The first vessel is a jug, or mesciroba, 16 centimeters tall. It has a globular body, a long cylindrical neck, and a spout with a distinctive triangular cross-section, while the handle consists of two snake-like forms joined together—a design that gives the object a particularly elaborate appearance. The white surface is decorated in deep blue with peonies, daisies, and lotus flowers. The decoration draws specifically on Chinese porcelain from the Ming Dynasty and the Yongle period, but the Eastern model is not the object’s sole source of inspiration. The shapes of the flowers, in fact, derive from a decorative tradition that had already been influenced by Islamic metalware, while the structure of the vessel recalls the Hispano-Moorish mescirobes with tall necks and spheroidal bodies produced in the Valencia region between the 14th and 15th centuries. […]

The second piece, on the other hand, is slightly larger, about 20 centimeters tall, and has a different shape. It is a vase with an ovoid body, two opposing serpentine handles, and a hexagonal spout protruding from the body (its shape finds a parallel in the grotesque-decorated Urbino majolica pieces that had already been part of the Medici collections since 1569).

The grand-ducal workshop of Casino di San Marco was one of several founded by Francesco I as a laboratory for experimentation where painters, sculptors, academics and artisans worked together to investigate natural phenomena and invent new materials and processes. Francesco had a great personal interest in alchemy and glassmaking, as well as in collecting at and antiquities, and he invested much time and money promoting technical innovation by marrying the experimental sciences in the applied arts.

On the first floor of the palace alone were glass works, an alchemy laboratory, foundries for metal work, including the forging of steel tools hard enough to hew porphyry, furnaces where rock crystal was fused to create decorative objects and precious stones (emeralds, rubies) were counterfeited, and ovens for producing a soft paste porcelain that became known as “Medici porcelain.”

In 1575, the Florentine manufactory succeeded in producing the first examples of what would come to be known as “Medici Porcelain, ” a soft-paste porcelain that represented Europe’s first successful attempt to reproduce the Eastern material. The venture was short-lived, however: the very high temperatures required for firing and the high production costs limited its development, and the manufactory ceased operations after the death of Francesco I in 1587, resulting in a very limited production run (the inventories of the Medici court recorded about three hundred pieces, but today only sixty or seventy survive worldwide). It is in this context that the donation of the two vases to the Museum of San Marco should be viewed, as it expands an already extremely rare presence in Tuscan public collections.

Both vases bear the workshop’s mark on the bottom: the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore painted in blue, surmounted by the letter “F,” the initial identifying Florence. This is one of the features that allows us to recognize production linked to the court of Francesco I and immediately connects the objects to the experimentation carried out in the Tuscan capital.

The vases have gone on display in the Museum of San Marco’s Greek Hall, where they will be neighbors with Renaissance majolica apothecary jars from the Dominican convent that was across the street from the Casino di San Marco.

Roman sailor’s grave marker found in New Orleans goes on display in Italy

Ancient, Museums

The National Archeological Museum of Civitavecchia officially reopened to the public on Thursday after a major renovation and redesign, and the repatriated funerary inscription of Roman navy soldier Sextus Congenius Verus is one of the featured artifacts. The information plaque credits Tulane University anthropologist Daniella Santoro and her husband Aaron Lorenz for the rediscovery of the slab in the backyard of their New Orleans home and its return to Italy.

The marble slab with the funerary inscription of a Roman sailor dating to the 2nd century A.D. made headlines last year when it was discovered so incongruously in the backyard of a historic shotgun house in the Carrolton neighborhood of New Orleans.

The Latin inscription translates to:

“To the spirits of the dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the praetorian fleet Misenensis, from the tribe (natio) of the Bessi, (who) lived 42 years (and) served 22 in the military, on the trireme Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, made (this) for him well deserving.”

The Praetorian fleet of Misenum and the trireme Asclepius were harbored and resupplied at the port of Centumcellae, the ancient name of Civitavecchia. It was a rectangular port on the Tyrrhenian sea 35 miles northwest of Rome built in 108 A.D. by Trajan’s architect Apollodorus of Damascus. It was one of the most important seaports in the western Mediterranean for hundreds of years.

Funerary inscriptions of many soldiers who served on the Misenum and Ravenna fleets have been discovered in Civitavecchia. A necropolis replete with them was unearthed during construction of a prison in 1864, the slab dedicated to Sextus Congenius Verus among them. For decades they were exhibited at the city’s National Archaeological Museum.

The ancient port (with later improvements and additions) was still in use during World War II, which made it a target for Allied bombing. The port and the museum were destroyed in bombing raids in 1943 and 1944. Sextus Congenius Verus’ inscription went missing. It was listed on an earlier inventory, but had not been seen since the museum was bombed in 1943.

After Tulane University Classics professor Susann Lusnia translated the funerary inscription and identified its origins in Civitavecchia, the slab was given to the FBI’s Art Crime Team to arrange repatriation. It was officially returned to Italy in a ceremony in Rome in April of this year. Conservators at the National Archeological Museum of Civitavecchia cleaned and prepared it for exhibition while the museum’s refurbishment project was completed.

Sextus Congenius Verus’ funerary marker is now part of a new permanent exhibition that creates a cohesive narrative of the 3,000-year-old history of Civitavecchia and its environs. Objects that have been in storage for decades are now in public view for the first time. The updated exhibition will also include new 3D models, multimedia displays and accessibility tools to make the archaeological patrimony of Civitavecchia widely accessible to visitors of all abilities.