Month: March 2022

Birds and fruit mosaics found at villa near Verona

Ancient

Excavations at a 3rd-4th century Roman country villa in the town of Negrar di Valpolicella near Verona have unearthed new mosaics. Long stretches of geometric, wave, flora and semi-circular designs were discovered underneath a working vineyard in 2020 and the find got sensational press, allowing archaeologists to secure funding and support to expand the excavation area to neighboring properties.

The newly-discovered mosaics were found on the western side of the courtyard of the villa’s large rectangular peristyle garden. The courtyard was huge, more than 4,000 square feet in area, so the peristyle colonnade that surrounded it provided a large amount of floor space to cover with mosaics of animals, fruit, braids, florals and geometric motifs.

Like all Roman rustic estates, the villa had a residential section and an agricultural production/processing section, but so far only the residential areas have been explored. The first mosaics from a large country villa were discovered in Negrar in 1887. The excavation unearthed another three mosaics that were purchased by the city of Verona. The accidental discovery of a mosaic fragment during agricultural work in 1922 spurred another archaeological excavation that brought to light additional mosaic floors, and one more room with mosaic flooring was added to the tally in 1975, so many that the estate was dubbed the Villa of the Mosaics.

In 2019, excavations resumed on the Benedetti vineyard for the first time in decades. The mosaic floors found in 2020 were part of this project. The pandemic put a wrench in the works for a while, but archaeologists returned to the site in January of this year to excavate the Franchini Agricultural Society’s property adjacent to the Benedetti farm.

Excavations are ongoing (as long as funding permits). The ultimate aim is to cover the mosaics with clear plexiglass and make the site an open-air archaeological park with the cooperation of the agricultural concerns that own the land.

Shackleton’s Endurance found off Antarctica

Modern(ish)

The wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance has been discovered in the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica 107 years after it was trapped there and 100 years after Shackleton’s death.

Mensun Bound, Director of Exploration on the expedition, said:

“We are overwhelmed by our good fortune in having located and captured images of Endurance.  This is by far the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen. It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact, and in a brilliant state of preservation.  You can even see ‘Endurance’ arced across the stern, directly below the taffrail.”

Captained by Frank Worsley, Endurance carried 28 souls, including leader Sir Ernest Shackleton on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition in 1914. The goal of the expedition was to achieve the first land crossing of Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. Shackleton and the crew of Endurance never even made landfall. The ship was tied down by the sea-ice for 10 months before it was finally crushed by the pressure of the pack ice and sank. The men were forced to abandon ship and camp out on ice floes for months before managing to make it to Elephant Island on Endurance‘s lifeboats. From there Shackleton and five men took a single lifeboat and traveled 800 miles to the island of South Georgia in the southern Atlantic. Shackleton was able to reach a whaling station and organize a rescue party for the 22 crewmen he’d had to leave behind on Elephant Island. In an amazing testament to just how tough these guys were, all 28 members of Shackleton’s crossing party made it home alive.

The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust organized an expedition to find the Endurance that departed Cape Town for the Weddell Sea this February. A multi-disciplinary team of educators, explorers, scientists and documentarians equipped with state-of-the-art submersible vehicles, remote operated vehicles and underwater drones were transported to the wreck site on the SA Agulhas II, a South African ice breaking polar research chip.

After two weeks of searching, they found the wreck on Saturday (the 100th anniversary of Shackleton’s funeral) about four miles south of the final position recorded by Captain Worsley. It was 9869 feet below the surface and exceptionally well-preserved in the cold Antarctic waters.

The underwater drones produced stunningly clear images of the 144-foot-long ship. Amazingly, the helm has remained intact after more than a century underwater, with gear piled against the taffrail as if Shackleton’s crew had only recently left it.

The ship’s wooden timbers, while damaged from the crush of ice that sank in, still hold together. Sea anemones, sponges and other small ocean life made homes on the wreckage, but did not appear to have damaged it.

Endurance is protected as a Historic Site and Monument under the International Antarctic Treaty, so it will not be interfered with at all. No objects will be recovered. No physical contact will be made. The site, wreck and debris field, will be fully documented, photographed, scanned and filmed.

Japanese painted screens gifted to Queen Victoria rediscovered

Modern(ish)

Two painted screens given as a diplomatic gift to Queen Victoria by the Japanese Shōgun Tokugawa Iemochi in 1860 have been rediscovered in the Royal Collection. The hand-painted screens depicting the changing seasons were part of a group of gifts sent by the Shogun to mark the signing of the Ansei Five-Power Treaties in 1858 and the resumption of formal diplomatic relations between Japan and Britain after the Shogunate’s isolationist foreign policy was forcibly broken by the “gunboat diplomacy” of Western powers.

Folding screens had been prized as diplomatic gifts the last time Japan was in the game in the 17th century, and the Shōgun made them the centerpiece of his gift to Queen Victoria. There were eight pairs of painted silk screens, plus a set of lacquer furniture, spears inlaid with mother of pearl and swords. The screens were appreciated at the time, but they were poorly documented and because there was no record of the 1860 screens in the Royal Collection, they were not believed to have survived to the present.

Two of them were rediscovered in 2017 when Dr. Rosina Buckland, Curator of the Japanese Collections at the British Museum, identified the signature of the artist Itaya Hiroharu who was known to have worked on Queen Victoria’s screens. It seems the screens were miscataloged as being by an unknown Japanese artist with no reference to their having been a gift from the Shōgun.

Little is known about how the screen paintings were displayed after they arrived in Britain, but evidence of historic repairs found during conservation suggests that they were regularly used and admired at the British Court. Specialist conservators discovered that fragments of a Victorian railway timetable had been used to paper over torn areas – most likely because replacement Japanese paper was not readily available. Stations listed in the timetable begin at Windsor, suggesting that the historic repairs may have taken place at Windsor Castle and that the screens were displayed there.

Conservators also found that the painted silk panels had been mounted on just two to three layers of paper, rather than the usual six to nine, allowing acidic content from the wooden frames to discolour the painted silk over time. This was likely because the paintings had to be mounted very quickly: on 11 November 1859, a huge fire broke out at Edo Castle in what is now Tokyo, destroying the completed paintings. Replacements were hastily commissioned, but just weeks later the screens’ original artist, Itaya Keishū Hironobu, died and the work had to be passed to his pupil, Hiroharu.

The screens are going on display in Japan: Courts and Culture, a new exhibition at Buckingham Palace dedicated to the Japanese artworks in the Royal Collection. The lacquer furniture and weapons from the diplomatic gift will also be on display, along with a selection of exceptional examples of Japanese craftsmanship accumulated by British monarchs from James I to Elizabeth II. The exhibition opens April 8th and runs through February 26, 2023.

Anne Boleyn’s falcon returns to Hampton Court Palace

Renaissance

The carved gilded wood falcon that sold for a hundred bucks at auction only to reveal itself to be a 16th century heraldic badge of Anne Boleyn’s removed from Hampton Court Palace after the demise of her marriage (and of her person) has come home to roost. As of March 4th, the 500th anniversary of Anne’s first fateful encounter with King Henry VIII at the court pageant, an emblem of her brief stint as queen has gone on display in the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace.

The falcon was acquired at auction in 2019 by dealer Paul Fitzsimmons of Marhamchurch Antiques. Fitzsimmons, a specialist in early English oak furniture and artworks, recognized its fine craftsmanship and suspected it might have a connection to the royalty because of the imperial crown and scepter. Once it was liberated from a thick coating of black paint, soot, wax and grime, the original white, red and gold paint were revealed and the falcon was brought to experts at Historic Royal Palaces for assessment.

Having carefully examined the piece, curators at Historic Royal Palaces turned to original accounts of Henry VIII’s work to enlarge and embellish Hampton Court, and to comparing the find with remaining detailing from the period, in an attempt to shed light on the falcon’s origins. This work has revealed an incredible likeness in both size and design to the 43 surviving falcon badges decorating the ‘frieze’ above the windows and hammer beams in the palace’s Great Hall, leading them to believe that the carving is an element of the room’s original Tudor scheme.

The Great Hall sits at the very heart of Hampton Court Palace and was designed both to impress and to proclaim Henry VIII’s power and magnificence. Henry’s carpenters began working on the huge timber roof – the last great medieval hammerbeam-roof hall in England– in 1532, and to celebrate his marriage to Anne Boleyn, motifs relating to the new Queen were incorporated into its design. Her coat of arms, the entwined letters H and A and her heraldic badge were all added to the Hall’s decoration. Given the fate awaiting Anne, the Great Hall was to become an unintended memorial to her reign. Records for the works show that a Michael Joyner was paid £5 4s 2d for 250 ‘of the King’s and Queens badges standing upon the Caters within the said Hall at v[5]d the piece’, bringing the name of the carving’s likely creator to light almost five centuries later.

While tradition has it that after Anne’s execution Henry completely erased references to her from his many homes and palaces, research has revealed that during alterations to Hampton Court Palace following his remarriage to Jane Seymour, two craftsmen (John Heath and Henry Blankston) were employed to repaint and adapt Hampton Court’s existing decorative scheme. It is at this point curators now believe that the white falcons were overpainted in black, thereby severing their visual association with the former Queen.

Fitzsimmons has loaned the falcon to Hampton Court Palace where it will remain for the indefinite future.

Sebastian Edwards, Deputy Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, said: “Ever since my colleague Tracy Borman first flagged the carved falcon badge as a discovery meriting further investigation, it’s been a tantalising historic ‘what if?’. While we won’t be able to say for certain whether it was originally created for Hampton Court’s Great Hall until the next time we erect a roof-height scaffold and compare it with those still in situ – which might not be for some years – the evidence that has emerged during our research lends great weight to the theory, particularly with there being one falcon less than we’d expect in the surviving decorative scheme! Either way, this is an incredibly rare example of Tudor royal ornamentation, imbued with the legend of Henry’s most famous Queen, which I hope will provide visitors to Hampton Court with a small taste of the jaw-dropping magnificence of the palace during the Tudor period.”

Pictish symbol stone found near famous standing stones

Ancient, Medieval

Archaeologists have unearthed a rare Pictish symbol stone dating to the 5th or 6th century in the village of Aberlemno, Scotland. Aberlemno is known for a group of Pictish and Early Medieval standing stones, the most famous of which depicts a clash of armed infantry and cavalry forces believed to have been the Battle of Nechtansmere where the Picts defeated the Northumbrians in 685 A.D., ending Northumbrian control of Scotland once and for all.

University of Aberdeen archaeologists discovered the slab during a geophysical survey of the site as part of a larger study of the context of the Aberlemno Sculptured Stones. The scans revealed the presence of anomalies that might be connected to an ancient settlement. The team dug a small test pit and almost immediately encountered a slab 5.5 feet long lying on its back. As the soil was removed, Pictish symbols were revealed.

The large stone is incised with a variety of symbols, including the mirror and comb, a crescent, V-rod, triple ovals and the double disc and z-rod designs. Next to it was another slab carved with cup-markings typical of prehistoric symbol stones. These were sometimes reused by the Picts who would add their own carvings to the far more ancient monuments. This was likely a deliberate choice reflecting Pictish understanding of the symbolic significance of their Bronze Age predecessors’ rock art.

The stone was embedded in a pavement that was part of a building from the 11th or 12th century, so it was not in its original location like the other standing stones of Aberlemno. There is evidence that the later medieval building was constructed directly above far older settlement layers going back to the Pictish era.

Professor Gordon Noble who leads the project says stumbling upon a stone as part of an archaeological dig is very unusual.

“Here at the University of Aberdeen we’ve been leading Pictish research for the last decade but none of us have ever found a symbol stone before,” he said.

“There are only around 200 of these monuments known. They are occasionally dug up by farmers ploughing fields or during the course of road building but by the time we get to analyse them, much of what surrounds them has already been disturbed.

“To come across something like this while digging one small test pit is absolutely remarkable and none of us could quite believe our luck.

“The benefits of making a find in this way are that we can do much more detailed work in regard to the context. We can examine and date the layers underneath it and extract much more detailed information without losing vital evidence. […]

“The discovery of this new Pictish symbol stone and evidence that this site was occupied over such a long period will offer new insights into this significant period in the history of Scotland as well as helping us to better understand how and why this part of Angus became a key Pictish landscape and latterly an integral part of the kingdoms of Alba and Scotland.”

The stone was lifted and transported to the to Graciela Ainsworth conservation lab in Edinburgh for additional study. The University of Aberdeen will work with the Pictish Arts Society to raise funds for the symbol stone’s conservation and eventual display.