September 2014 – Page 2 – The History Blog

Do you recall the 1954 London Mithraeum dig?

September 25, 2014

It all began in 1952 when a team of archaeologists from the Roman and Medieval London Excavation Council dug a few exploratory trenches on a construction site in central London’s Walbrook Square. Victorian buildings on the site had been all but leveled by German bombs during the Blitz. The ruins were slated to be demolished a new office block for an insurance company to be built at the location. The only reason archaeologists were there is that the lost river Walbrook had once flowed through the area so the site was surveyed to record alluvial deposits that would establish how the Walbrook changed over time. Informative, but far from glamorous.

For two years the excavation, led by Welsh archaeologist Professor William Francis Grimes and Audrey Williams, puttered along drawing no interest whatsoever. They were almost done when the team unearthed the walls and floors of a stone building from the Roman period. They thought it was a private villa or maybe a public building until in mid-September they found an altar at one end that identified the structure as a temple. As historically significant a find as it was, it was still slated to be destroyed to make way for the ugly new grey box of offices.

Then on Saturday, September 18th, 1954, the last day of the excavation, a marble head of the god Mithras, identifiable by his characteristic Phrygian cap, was found. The handsome young deity would have gone unnoticed too if it hadn’t been for a newspaper photographer from nearby Fleet Street who was on the spot and took some pictures. They were printed the next day in The Sunday Times and caused an immediate sensation.

For weeks it was front page news. Immense crowds flocked to the site to see the temple, an estimated 400,000 people in total. The question of the temple’s dire fate was now a national scandal. It was debated in Parliament and twice in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. The problem was nobody had the money to preserve the temple in situ. The government was broke and the developers couldn’t afford to move the planned building. Ultimately a compromise was worked out: the Ministry of Works would fund additional excavation and the developers would pay to remove the temple and reconstruct it at ground level for public display.

The extended excavations unearthed more sculptures — a group including Minerva, the hand of Mithras and a head of Serapis that were deliberately buried under the nave perhaps to keep them safe from depredation or as a respectful deposition when the temple was rebuilt and re-dedicated to the god Bacchus. Pottery from the earliest layers indicates the Mithraeum was first built around 240 A.D. It was extensively reconstructed in 350 A.D. after which it remained in use until the end of the Roman period.

The sculptures were conserved and put on display in the Museum of London where they joined a relief of Mithras slaying the Bull of Heaven that had been unearthed at Walbrook in 1889. The relief has an inscription that may shed light on the temple’s construction: “Ulpius Silvanus / Emeritus Leg(ionis) II Aug(ustae) / Votum Solvit / Factus Arausione” meaning “Ulpius Silvanus / veteran of the Second August Legion / paid his vow / made at Orange.” “Made” in this case doesn’t refer to the relief sculpture, but rather to Ulpius Silvanus himself, either he was discharged (made a veteran) or initiated into the Mithraic religion (made a devotee of Mithras). The Walbrook Mithraeum itself could be the vow he paid.

The temple was rebuilt in 1962 on Queen Victoria Street, 300 feet or so from its find site and 30 feet above its original depth. The ancient masonry was put back together using modern cement mortar on a crazy-paving floor. The original floor was wood. We know this because some of the joists were found during the excavation thanks to the preserving power of the waterlogged Walbrook soil. It looked … weird, to put it generously, out of place and squat and not at all like it had looked in situ. Grimes said the 1962 rebuild was “virtually meaningless as a reconstruction of a mithraeum.”

In December 2010, Bloomberg LP bought the Walbrook Square site to build its new European headquarters. The archaeological survey has retread some of the same ground as the Grimes excavation but has found oh so much more amazingness. The new complex will integrate the archaeological discoveries into the construction, and the Temple of Mithras will be part of that plan. In 2011, stonemasons carefully dismantled the reconstructed temple, removing the 1960s concrete and carefully storing the original Roman stone and tile. It will be rebuilt with a care for authenticity this time, installed 25 feet below ground level in the same spot where it was found. The underground space will be a public exhibition area in the Bloomberg building. The building is scheduled to be complete in 2017.

The Museum of London is collaborating with Bloomberg to ensure the Walbrook Mithraeum re-reconstruction is done properly this time. The museum has extensive records from 1954, but they have no extant color images of the temple in situ. In order to get as many details as possible about the temple, both for the reconstruction and to more thoroughly document this exceptional find while people who remember it are still around, the museum is collecting oral histories, pictures, home movies, ephemera about the 1954 dig.

They’re also hoping someone somewhere may have some actual pieces of Roman stone or mortar. At the time, construction workers and visitors were known to have pilfered themselves some souvenirs, so there could well be something very important cluttering up people’s attics that they may not even realize. Anything that reveals the original color of the stones, bricks, tiles and mortar would be very helpful. The oral histories, images, etc. will be included as part of the Temple exhibition in the Bloomberg building.

If you have any memories, information, images or souvenirs of the 1954 excavation, email the Museum of London at oralhistory@mola.org.uk or call them at 020 7410 2266 during office hours.

Now, thanks to the ever-delightful Pathé archive, please enjoy two newsreels about the dig. The first is a short clip of the excavation site. The fellow with the glasses is Harold Plenderleith, a pioneering conservator and archaeologist who part of the team who excavated King Tutankhamun’s tomb, Sir Leonard Woolley’s digs at Ur, and the Sutton Hoo ship burial. How’s that for an archaeological trifecta?

[youtube=http://youtu.be/leUQnbh0458&w=430]

A more detailed look at the sculptures recovered and their conservation:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/bRV-vskr1Nc&w=430]

Barcaccia fountain in Piazza di Spagna restored

September 24, 2014

Modern(ish), Renaissance, Roma, Caput Mundi

The Barcaccia fountain at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna reopened to the public Monday after a 10-month restoration. The restoration cost 209,960 euro ($268,000) and was funded entirely by the sale of advertising space on site during eight months of the work. According to Paola Conti, technical director of Technicon, the firm contracted to restore the fountain, the most time-consuming aspect was removing the calcification that in just 15 years since the last restoration had grown up to a centimeter thick. They also had to remove biological organisms that thrive in the wet, light-filled environment. Old plaster from past repairs was replaced and finally the entire structure painted with a protective coating.

The fountain was built between 1627 and 1629 by Pietro Bernini, father of Gian Lorenzo Bernini whose architecture and sculpture would come to define Baroque Rome, in the shape of the low flat-bottomed river boats used to carry cargo across the Tiber in the 17th century. This was a very unusual approach in Mannerist Rome, more sculptural than architectural, a naturalistic, deceptively simple design that symbolized the fruitfulness and plenty of a boat low in the water, laden with bounty. Legend has it that during the devastating flood of Christmas 1598, the high waters, which reached a top mark of 20 meters above sea level, carried a boat all the way to the Piazza di Spagna. When the waters receded, the boat was stranded in the exact spot of the fountain. Ostensibly that’s why Bernini built the fountain in the shape of a boat 30 years later.

Pope Urban VIII commissioned Pietro Bernini to build the fountain as part of a program envisioned by earlier popes that would place fountains in every major piazza in Rome. Urban also wanted to celebrate his restoration of the great Acqua Vergine aqueduct, originally built in 19 B.C. by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, Augustus’ son-in-law and right hand man. The pope had appointed the elder Bernini architect of the aqueduct in 1623, so having him build a new fountain to take advantage of the refreshed water source was a fitting bookend.

The Acqua Vergine is unique among Rome’s aqueducts in that it was the only one that continued to work even in the devastated Medieval city through the Renaissance revival of public works. In the 14th century, when almost the entire city population was clustered on the malarial and flood-prone banks of the Tiber because they were bound by the range of the professional water carriers, only rione Trevi, the district at the foot of the Quirinal hill blessed with a fountain fed by the Acqua Vergine, had a significant population relatively distant from the Tiber. That Trevi fountain was not the one you see today with the giant statue of Oceanus guarding ever so many tourist coins. The current fountain was built in 1762. The Medieval one was a modest affair, a rectangle with three basins, enlarged in the 15th century to a wide trough fed by three spouts.

The aqueduct was regularly maintained and repaired during the heyday of the Western Empire, but even after the Goths sacked the city in 537 A.D., specifically targeting the aqueducts, the Acqua Vergine kept trucking. This is mainly attributable to its nearby source and the predominance of underground tunnels. The water starts as rainfall in the Alban Hills, then filters through volcanic tuff before springing up in a town about eight miles east of Rome called Salone. The aqueduct starts at Salone, so it doesn’t have far to go to get to Rome, and since it was intended to water the lower-lying areas of the city, the pathways stay down low too. It was restored once in the 8th century by Pope Hadrian I and that seems to have kept it going until the 15th century when Pope Nicholas V commissioned a restoration project.

There were always issues, mind you. It needed repair and cleaning on the regular to keep the water flowing, and the city magistrates passed all kinds of laws to keep people from tainting it by bathing their livestock and doing their laundry in the Trevi basin. Then there were all the individuals illegally tapping into the conduit to water their personal homes and gardens. A pope was one of the greatest offenders on that score: Pope Julius III, who swallowed up so much Acqua Vergine for his new home, the Villa Julia (built in 1553) and its elaborate grounds and entrance fountain, that by 1559 the Trevi fountain ran dry. To address the choked supply, in 1570 Pope Pius V had the Acqua Vergine restored all the way back to Salone. Urban VIII’s intervention in 1623 extended the path of the aqueduct to supply the growing city. It was this restoration that brought the water to the location of the current Fountain of Trevi.

The Barcaccia played a more poignant historical role 200 years later. The poet John Keats lived the last few months of his life in a house on the Spanish Steps. So devastated by tuberculosis that he often cried upon waking to find himself still alive, Keats took comfort from the soothing sound of the Barcaccia’s flowing water. It made him think of a line from the Jacobean play Philaster by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher: “As you are living, all your better deeds / Shall be in water writ.” Inspired by that line, Keats asked that his tombstone be inscribed solely “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” no name, no date. When the tuberculosis finally claimed his life on February 23rd, 1821, his friend and carer Joseph Severn couldn’t quite bring himself to comply with Keats’ final wish. Instead, he took the opportunity to castigate the critics who had never appreciated Keats’ genius in life.

“This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraven on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821”

Although the fountain was inaccessible to visitors during the restoration, it and the conservators were visible thanks to an innovative plexiglass enclosure. Seeing is nice, but the Barcaccia is an interactive experience. It was specifically designed for people to drink from. The pure and delicious Acqua Vergine springs from jets at the bow and stern. Travertine platforms at each end of the boat give you a place to stand, albeit a rather damp place, so you can stretch out and quaff mightily from the water’s spouts. At Monday’s inauguration of the pristine fountain, the mayor of Rome Ignazio Marino, culture councillor Giovanna Marinelli and the Capitoline Superintendent Claudio Parisi Presicce were the first to drink from the newly reactivated water. They used a plastic cup, though, which is just wrong, in my opinion. They should have stretched out like the rest of us, sashes and suits be damned. Virgin Water in a plastic cup? I mean really.

You can see the fountain cleaned and the waters turned back on in this Italian news story about Monday’s inauguration:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/gEl9xx2NsI4&w=430]

MoMA finds lost 1913 film with all-black cast

September 23, 2014

Modern(ish), Multimedia, Museums

New York City’s Museum of Modern Art has discovered footage of a previously unknown 1913 film with vaudeville and Broadway pioneer Bert Williams starring in a cast of all black actors. It’s not a completed film that a movie theater would have received, but rather seven reels of unassembled daily rushes, multiple takes from each scene, that the director and editor would later edit together into the finished picture. The museum discovered the footage in its collection of 900 negatives from the Biograph studios that were rescued from destruction by MoMA’s first film curator, Iris Barry, when the company’s Bronx warehouse closed in 1939.

It is the earliest surviving film to feature an all-black cast, and is among the earliest ever shot. The Foster Photoplay Company, a Chicago film production company founded in 1910 by theatrical promoter and entertainment journalist William Foster, released what is thought to be the first all-black picture, The Railroad Porter, in June of 1913. MoMA researchers discovered that the Bert Williams film was shot in September of 1913. None of the early Foster Photoplay movies have survived. (Unrelated but interesting coincidence: William Foster worked as a publicity promoter for Bert Williams and his partner George Walker’s groundbreaking 1903 musical In Dahomey, the first full-length musical comedy written and performed by African-Americans to be staged in a Broadway theater, and its equally successful 1906 follow-up Abyssinia.)

Unlike the Foster pictures which were created, shot and performed by black artists, only the actors in the recently discovered footage were black. They were employed by the famed Biograph Company, the film production company which launched the careers of D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennet, Mary Pickford, Lilian Gish, Mabel Normand and Lionel Barrymore. Biograph hired Bert Williams, who by then was hugely famous for his vaudeville routines, musicals and best-selling song recordings, to star in their all-black comedies. He had to wear blackface, which is as incongruous as it is gross considering that none of the other actors (that I can see in the stills, at least) are in blackface.

Even though it includes elements of minstrelsy, the general subject matter and approach does appear to be more in keeping with the “race films” that Foster and other black producers made to counter the ugly stereotypical caricatures of on-screen minstrel pictures.

Of historical relevance is the display of adult romantic feelings between black performers, which was largely considered unacceptable to white audiences into the first two decades of the 20th century. In the film, a repeated, lengthy kiss between Williams and his costar appears to be the earliest surviving portrayal of a serious romantic relationship between black characters on film. The film also features a lengthy early example of African American vernacular dance, with a nearly two-minute, full-cast performance of a cakewalk, the dance that Williams and partners George Walker and Aida Overton Walker had made an international sensation with theater audiences and the white upper class around 1900.

Although no main title, intertitles, script, or production credits have survived with the film, MoMA’s curators tried to reconstruct the film’s narrative, ultimately piecing together what appears to be a middle-class comedy centered on the membership of Williams’s character in a black social club, with an additional plotline concerning Williams and rival suitors vying for the hand of the local beauty after a day of fairground activities, a bit of larceny, and a night of exhibition dancing.

The plot and characters of the film aren’t the only historically significant elements of this find. There’s also behind-the-scenes footage of the black cast interacting with the white crew on set in New York City and on location in what curators believe is Englewood, New Jersey.

The unedited rushes and MoMA’s research will go on display at the museum’s 100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History exhibition on October 24th. The assembled footage will be screened at MoMA’s 12th annual film preservation festival To Save and Project on November 8th.

Meanwhile, here’s a 1916 Biograph picture starring Bert Williams that has survived intact. As with the cakewalk scene in the recently discovered film, A Natural Born Gambler features one of Bert Williams’ most famous vaudeville routines. It’s the final scene of the picture (beginning at 19:30) in which Williams pantomimes an entire poker game alone.

The Internet Archive, bless its generous heart, has an impressive collection of Bert Williams’ music. His recordings were wildly successful, selling in the hundreds of thousands back when a record that moved 10,000 copies was considered a best-seller. His most famous was probably Nobody, but my favorite is 1920’s When The Moon Shines on The Moonshine both because it’s catchy and because it’s such a perfect little window into the first year of Prohibition.

Napoleon and Josephine had a prenup

September 22, 2014

Modern(ish)

The day before Napoleon and Josephine’s wedding, the couple signed a marriage contract, but it wasn’t like a license you’d get from city hall. It takes a hard-nosed practical approach we’d recognize today as a prenuptial agreement, and quite a progressive one at that.

Article 1: There will be no community property between the future spouses. … Accordingly, the future spouses will not be liable for each other’s debts and mortgages.
Article 2: Each of the future spouses will enjoy separately and individually the property, rights and actions both movable and immovable belonging to them and that may belong to them thereafter in any capacity and any manner it is and in which it may consist. …The future wife will not be bound to seek her husband’s permission for acts that would entail the alienation of her capital. The future husband also authorizes the future wife to continue the functions of guardianship that have been granted her of the two minor children issue of her first marriage.
Article 3: Each of the future spouses will contribute half of the expenses of the marriage.
Article 4: The future husband establishes for the future wife a dowry of 1500 livres annuity for life, ancient value. …
Article 5: In case of dissolution of marriage, the future wife and her heirs reclaim: 1) clothes, linen, rags, lace, silver, jewelry and diamonds for the personal use of said future wife, 2) all the furniture and other movable objects and whatever type they be that the future wife or her heirs can prove were acquired by her or that otherwise belong to her.
Article 6: The future wife declares and the future husband recognizes that the furniture, linens, silverware and generally all the movable tangible assets of which the future wife is now in possession that was community property between her and her first husband and that continues with her children lack her having made an inventory within the time limit prescribed by law. That the future wife is to proceed to make this inventory and is about to be completed. That she, future wife, can not declare now the amount of this fortune because it all depends on the question of knowing if she will accept the community or whether she will renounce it, however she cannot determine that until after the making of the inventory.

It seems that lack of inventory may have been a deliberate oversight on Josephine’s part. Without an itemized list, who’s to say which items she wanted to take should the marriage fall apart was community property from her first marriage? Then there’s the deception both spouses engaged in. Josephine was six years older than Napoleon and this was subject of some societal and familial tut-tutting, particularly on his family’s side. So in the official marriage contract, Napoleon is aged by one year and Josephine rejuvenated by four.

On the afternoon of March 8th, 1796 (18 Ventôse IV by the French Revolutionary Calendar), the marriage contract was signed by Napoleon Bonaparte, Chief of the Army of the Interior (he had already been appointed Chief of the Army of Italy on March 2nd, but the promotion didn’t take effect until March 11th, the day he left Paris with his army to invade Italy), and Rose Marie Josèphe Tascher, widow of Alexandre François Marie de Beauharnais. It was notarized by Maurice-Jean Raguideau de La Fosse and Étienne-Gabriel Jousset and witnessed by the future general and future count Jean-Léonor-François Le Marois, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp. On March 9th, 1796, Napoleon and Josephine were wed.

The notary Raguideau reportedly thought this marriage was a terrible idea, not for Napoleon but for Josephine. This anecdote is from the questionably accurate Memoirs (Volume 2, Chapter XXIX) of Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, a diplomat and former schoolmate of Napoleon’s who served as his secretary shortly after the marriage.

When Bonaparte was paying his addresses to Madame de BEAUHARNAIS, neither the one nor the other kept a carriage; and therefore Bonaparte frequently accompanied her when she walked out. One day they went together to the notary Raguideau, one of the shortest men I think I ever saw in my life, Madame de Beauharnais placed great confidence, in him, and went there on purpose to acquaint him of her intention to marry the young general of artillery,—the protege of Barras. Josephine went alone into the notary’s office, while Bonaparte waited for her in an adjoining room. The door of Raguideau’s office did not shut close, and Bonaparte plainly heard him dissuading Madame de Beauharnais from her projected marriage. “You are going to take a very wrong step,” said he, “and you will be sorry for it, Can you be so mad as to marry a young man who has nothing but his cloak and his sword?” Bonaparte, Josephine told me, had never mentioned this to her, and she never supposed that he had heard what fell from Raguideau. “Only think, Bourrienne,” continued she, “what was my astonishment when, dressed in the Imperial robes on the Coronation day, he desired that Raguideau might be sent for, saying that he wished to see him immediately; and when Raguideau appeared; he said to him, ‘Well, sir! have I nothing but my cloak and my sword now?'”

Because both parties lied shamelessly, the contract would have been null-and-void had it ever seen the inside of an honest courtroom. Instead, when Napoleon tired of Josephine’s lovers, debts and her uterus’ insistence on not producing an heir, he divorced her. They had a formal divorce ceremony on January 10th, 1810, and although Napoleon married Marie Louise, Archduchess of Austria, just two months later, he and Josephine remained friends. Napoleon ordered that she retain the rank and title of empress, granted her full ownership of the Château de Malmaison and a pension of 5 million francs a year. She was at Malmaison when she died in 1814 while Napoleon was in exile on the island of Elba. Her name was the last word he spoke on his death bed in 1821.

There are two extant copies of Napoleon and Josephine’s prenup. Napoleon’s personal copy went to the National Archives because he didn’t have time to have it sent to him before his departure for Italy. Josephine’s copy, bound in a portfolio of rose morocco, has been in private hands for two centuries. It was sold at the Osenat auction house in Paris on September 21st. Three phone bidders drove the price from the €60,000 to €80,000 ($77,000 – $103,000) pre-sale estimate to a final cost including fees of €437,500 ($560,000).

The buyer was the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, a privately-owned museum in Paris that bought Napoleon and Josephine’s divorce agreement from Osenat in 2007. Now they have the legal bookends of one of history’s greatest love stories.

Another dreamy Turner painting of Rome for sale

September 21, 2014

Modern(ish)

In July of 2010, Los Angeles’ J. Paul Getty Museum bought Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, a shimmering vista of the Roman Forum between the Capitoline and the Colosseum painted from memory by Joseph Mallord William Turner in 1839. The work had only had two previous owners and is in exceptional never-restored condition, so it far exceeded its pre-sale estimates and sold for $45 million, a new record for a Turner. The British government put a temporary export ban on the work to give UK museums a chance to match the price and keep the masterpiece in the country, but the ban expired before any museums could get anywhere near the sum and the Getty is now the proud owner of Turner’s glorious last painting of Rome.

Come December, the Getty will have an almost impossibly rare opportunity to secure another of Turner’s late Roman landscapes with the exact same provenance in the same untouched condition. Rome, from Mount Aventine will go up for auction at Sotheby’s Old Masters sale in London.

Alex Bell, joint international head and co-chairman of Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings Department, added: “There are fewer than ten major Turners in private hands known today and this work must rank as one of the very finest.

“This painting, which is nearly 200 years old, looks today as if it has come straight from the easel of the artist; never relined and never subject to restoration, the picture retains the freshness of the moment it was painted: the hairs from Turner’s brush, the drips of liquid paint which have run down the edge of the canvas, and every scrape of his palette knife have been preserved in incredible detail.”

Both paintings were commissioned by Scottish landowner and art collector Hugh Munro of Novar, one of Turner’s most important patrons. Turner painted Rome, from Mount Aventine in 1835, seven years after his last trip to Rome and one year before he and Munro traveled to Turin together. (Munro was the only patron of Turner’s ever to join him on a trip to Italy.) He based the painting on detailed sketches from the 1828 trip, sketchbooks that are now in the permanent collection of the Tate.

The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836 and was a huge hit with critics. The Morning Post described it as “one of those amazing pictures by which Mr Turner dazzles the imagination and confounds all criticism: it is beyond praise.” Munro kept the work in his London home until he died in 1864. It was sold along with Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, another of Munro’s commissions painted by Turner in 1839, at an 1878 auction of art from the Munro estate. Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, bought them both, Campo Vaccino for £4,240 and Aventine for £6,142. The latter was a record for a Turner work at that time, but Primrose could afford it because he had just married Hannah de Rothschild, scion of the great banking family and the richest woman in Britain. That record held for 10 years even during a period when Turner’s growing popularity drove prices way up.

Both paintings remained in the Primrose family for four generations. Rome, from Mount Aventine has been on long-term loan to the National Galleries of Scotland for 36 years. The family has decided to sell this one for the same reason they sold the last one: to secure an endowment that will provide for the maintenance of the Rosebery estates. The NGS hasn’t commented on whether it will attempt to buy the painting at auction, but with a pre-sale estimate of £15-20 million ($24,530,000 – $32,707,000) that is likely to be left in the dust, the NGS is going to have to do a ton of fundraising to compete with the inky deep pockets institutions like the Getty.