Month: May 2023

Rijksmuseum acquires alchemist’s ruby red glass masterpiece

Modern(ish)

A unique shell-shaped gold ruby red glass drinking cup by 17th century German alchemist, apothecary and glassmaker Johann Kunckel has been acquired by the Rijksmuseum. The deep, intense color of the red was produced by the addition of gold to the glass, a method and recipe pioneered by Kunckel. It dates to around 1685, Kunckel’s first decade as glassmaker to the court of Frederick William I, Elector of Brandenburg. Only about 20 of Kunckel’s early gold ruby red glass pieces are known, and the shape, style and engraving of this calyx cup is unique among them.

The chalice is engraved with a scene of putti frolicking around vines. The engraving is attributed to the master glass engraver Gottfried Spiller (1663-1728) who engraved several gold ruby ​​glasses. The glass is processed in such a way that it does not look like blown glass, but is more reminiscent of cut stone. This object therefore fits in with the tradition of the Kunstkammer, collections where wonderful objects from nature, science and art were brought together.

The fact that gold compounds add to glass could produce shades of red was known in antiquity. German alchemist Andreas Libavius wrote in his seminal text Alchemia in 1597 that dissolved gold created a red tincture that could be used to make “red crystal.” The first modern treatise on glass, written by Antonio Neri of Florence in 1612, also noted that gold can make red glass, but neither the ancient texts nor the later chemistry books included any information about the process or even a basic recipe.

The first person to record a functional method for obtaining ruby red glass was Bavarian chemist Johann Rudolph Glauber who in 1659 wrote that gold could be dissolved in a solution of a tin compound and hydrochloric acid. The gold would then precipitate from the solution as a purple powder later dubbed Purple of Cassius that could be added to glass to make it red.

Glauber’s experiments never delved into the making of the ruby glass itself. It was Johann Knuckel who as both an alchemist and a glass-maker, refined the recipe and process to create gold ruby ​​glassware. He published a treatise of his own on glass production and taught practical chemistry at the University of Wittenberg. In 1678, Prince Frederick William I, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, set Knuckel up on a secluded island near Potsdam with a glass-making factory where he could experiment and perfect his gold ruby glass production away from the prying eyes of competitors.

His was immensely successful and the glowing dark red glass he made was believed to be a new precious material, not just mere glass. Like rubies themselves, Knuckel’s gold ruby glass was thought to have health benefits particularly for illnesses of the blood. His work launched a fashion for ruby red glass at the end of the 17th century. Every sovereign and ruler at every court in Europe vied to own a gold ruby vessel, including the King of Sweden who poached the master away from the Elector in 1693 and gave him a noble title and estate. Johann von Löwenstern-Kunckel died in 1703 and the heyday of the ruby glass fad died with him.

Gold bust of Marcus Aurelius at Getty

Ancient, Museums

The golden bust of Emperor Marcus Aurelius from Avenches, western Switzerland, is going on display at the Getty. It is the largest known bust of an emperor made of a precious metal and one of only a handful of gold busts to escape being melted down. This Marcus Aurelius bust is so rare and so valuable that it is usually kept in a bank vault. The Roman Museum of Avenches keeps a copy on display instead. It has only been exhibited a dozen times, and never before in the United States.

The bust was discovered in 1939 in an excavation of a temple at Avenches’ ancient predecessor, Aventicum. Aventicum was the capital of the Helvetii and was incorporated into the Roman Empire under Augustus in 15 B.C. It was granted colony status by Vespasian in 71/2 A.D. which spurred a major urban redevelopment of the city. A large temple complex inspired by Vespasian’s Templum Pacis in Rome and dedicated to the local gods of the Helvetii and the cult of the emperor was built during this time.

Found in a sewer crossing underneath the main courtyard of the temple complex, the golden bust is 13 inches high and weighs 3.5 lbs, the equivalent of 220 gold aurei from Marcus Aurelius’ time (r. 161-180 AD). It is made from a single sheet of gold that was cold-worked in a repoussé technique. The goldsmith hammered the back of the sheet to create the features of the emperor in three dimensions — a thick head of hair, neat beard, intense eyes. Fine details were incised on to the exterior surface after the repoussé was complete. He wears a lorica plumata, a cuirass decorated with rows of feathers, around a central gorgoneion.

Only about 15 imperial portraits in precious metals and only six of those in gold made it through the gauntlet of being destroyed in antiquity for the value of their weight. Hollow, portable and requiring a support to stand, this type of portrait was created to be an imago, an effigy of the emperor meant to embody his sacred authority in processions and in temples dedicated to the imperial cult. Marcus Aurelius wrote in a letter in 162/3 A.D. to the curator of the temple at Ephesos that portraits of past emperors should never be altered to look like other emperors (a common practice with marble portraits) or melted down.

“There must be no re-working of the material into likenesses of us. For as we are not in other respects solicitous of honours for ourselves, much less should we permit those of others to be transferred to us. As many of the statues as are in good preservation should be kept under their original names, but with respect to those that are too battered to be identified, perhaps their titles can be recovered from inscriptions on their bases or from records that may exist in the possession of the Council, so that our progenitors may rather receive a renewal of their honour than its extinction through the melting down of their images.”

The bust will be on display at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles from May 31st of this year through January 29th, 2024.

Giant gilded Hercules regains his shine

Ancient, Museums, Roma, Caput Mundi

The largest surviving bronze statue from antiquity is undergoing a comprehensive restoration program in public view at the Vatican Museums in Rome. The Hercules Mastai Righetti is more than 13 feet tall and is gilded head to toe, an incredibly rare survival of a colossal bronze and even more incredibly rare survival of the full gold layer on a gilded ancient statue. Its otherworldly shine has dulled over the years, however, darkened by coatings of wax applied in the initial restoration after its discovery in the 19th century.

The statue first came to light in 1864 during work on the foundations of the Palazzo Pio Righetti, a 15th century palace on the Campo de’ Fiori that had recently been acquired by wealthy banker Pietro Righetti. Under the palace courtyard, workmen encountered an ancient wall and a bronze finger. The finger was so big that the statue it was attached to had to have been monumental in scale.

A subsequent excavation dug down 15 feet to find a wall of peperino (a grey volcanic tuff) flanked by columns believed to have been part of the foundation of the temple of Venus Victrix built by Pompey as a religious pretext to construct the first permanent theater in Rome attached to it.

(Today the remains of Pompey’s Theater underneath the Palazzo Pio Righetti have been incorporated into a restaurant that serves traditional Roman food in what is basically an underground archaeological park. I recommend the oxtail.)

Inside a ditch surrounded by travertine slabs was the colossal gilded bronze statue lying on its side. His feet were broken and the back of his head was missing, as were his genitals. It likely dates to between the end of the 1st century and the beginning of the 3rd, and is believed to be a copy of a Greek original from the late 4th century B.C.

Under the statue the diggers founds fragment of the skin of the Nemean lion, the broken right foot, fragments of the club Hercules used to slay the lion and a triangular slab of travertine inscribed “F C S.” The initials stand for “fulgor conditum summanium,” meaning “here lies a lightning bolt from Summanus.” These three little letters are a key clue to the statue’s fate: it had been struck by a thunderbolt at night (Summanus was the god of nocturnal thunder), which, according to an ancient Roman belief descended from the Etruscans, rendered the strike site a sacred area where any electrocuted objects had to be buried immediately.

Three months after its discovery, the bronze was bought by Pope Pius IX for the Vatican Museums collection. In 1866, the Hercules Mastai Righetti was installed in the Round Hall of the Pio Clementino Museum and has been there ever since. Visitors to the museum now have the opportunity to see Hercules’ shine restored before their eyes.

“The original gilding is exceptionally well-preserved, especially for the consistency and homogeneity,” Vatican Museum restorer Alice Baltera said. […]

The burial protected the gilding, but also caused dirt to build up on the statue, which Baltera said is very delicate and painstaking to remove. “The only way is to work precisely with special magnifying glasses, removing all the small encrustations one by one,” she said.

The work to remove the wax and other materials that were applied during the 19th-century restoration is complete. Going forward, restorers plan to make fresh casts out of resin to replace the plaster patches that covered missing pieces, including on part of the nape of the neck and the pubis.

The most astonishing finding to emerge during the preliminary phase of the restoration was the skill with which the smelters fused mercury to gold, making the gilded surface more enduring.

“The history of this work is told by its gilding. … It is one of the most compact and solid gildings found to date,’’ said Ulderico Santamaria, a University of Tuscia professor who is head of the Vatican Museums’ scientific research laboratory.

300,000-year-old human footprints are oldest found in Germany

Ancient

Fossilized footprints that are about 300,000 years old have been discovered at the Schöningen open-cast lignite mine. They are the oldest known human footprints ever found in Germany. Three footprints of Homo heidelbergensis, the pre-Neanderthal early humans who inhabited the area, were found between Paleolithic elephant tracks.

The site was the shoreline of a lake in the Paleolithic era, a watering hole for large mammals (horses, saber-toothed cats, deer, bears, wild boars, wolves, elephants, rhinoceros, aurochs, water buffalo), reptiles, birds and home to fish, mussels and microscopic organisms like diatoms. Remains and traces of all the creatures have been found, preserved in the dense layers of waterlogged soil and silt depositions.

The scientists attribute two of the three human tracks at Schöningen to young individuals who used the lake and its resources in a small mixed-age group. “Depending on the season, plants, fruits, leaves, shoots, and mushrooms were available around the lake. Our findings confirm that the extinct human species dwelled on lake or river shores with shallow water. This is also known from other Lower and Middle Pleistocene sites with hominin footprints,” says [Dr. Flavio Altamura, a fellow at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen].

The various tracks at Schöningen offer a snapshot of a family’s daily life and may provide information about the behavior and social composition of hominin groups as well as spatial interactions and coexistence with elephant herds and other, smaller mammals, according to the study. “Based on the tracks, including those of children and juveniles, this was probably a family outing rather than a group of adult hunters,” says the archaeologist and expert on fossil footprints. […]

“The elephant tracks we discovered at Schöningen reach an impressive length of 55 centimeters. In some cases, we also found wood fragments in the prints that were pushed into the—at that time still soft—soil by the animals,” explains Dr. Jordi Serangeli, excavation supervisor at Schöningen. “There is also one track from a rhinoceros—Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis or Stephanorhinus hemitoechus—which is the first footprint of either of these Pleistocene species ever found in Europe.”

Homo heidelbergensis made ample use of the lake’s abundant plant and animal resources. Stone tools and wood weapons have been excavated at the site, and butchering marks have been found on more than 10,000 animal bones. The local hominins didn’t just hunt the large mammals that frequented the lake; they also took advantage of their natural deaths. In 2017, archaeologists unearthed the nearly complete skeleton of a female straight-tusked forest elephant. She was about 50 years old and weighed almost seven tons, larger than a modern African elephant, with tusks 7.5 feet long. She almost certainly died of old age at the end of her natural lifespan. Elephants often came to the shore to die, and most of the bones were found in their anatomically correct arrangement. Even though she died in the water, bite marks on the bones indicate the carcass must have been available to scavengers above the surface for some time. Homo heidelbergensis helped themselves too, as evidenced by the three bone artifacts and 30 stone ones honed for butchering use.

The study of the fossil footprints has been published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews and can be read here.

Hoard of Roman Republic denarii on display

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures

A hoard of 175 silver denarii from the Roman Republic has gone on display for the first time a year and a half after it was discovered near Livorno, Tuscany. The coins, all but one struck by the mint in Rome, date to between 157 and 82 B.C. Except for two that are fragmented, they are intact and in excellent condition. The terracotta pot they were buried in was also found, making this an extremely rare complete Republican-era coin hoard that was archaeologically excavated upon discovery.

The coins were first discovered in November 2021 by Alberto Cecio while hiking the Tenuta Bellavista Insuese, an organic farm, agritourism destination and natural preserve a few miles north of Livorno. Cecio was looking for mushrooms in a forested area where the underbrush had recently been cleared and a few trees felled when he spotted a two potsherds each containing a small round clod. He brushed off some of the soil and realized the rounds were coins. As a member of the volunteer cultural organization the Paleontological Archaeological Group of Livorno, he understood they might be of archaeological significance so he immediately notified the local Superintendency of Archaeology and waited for six hours for their archaeologists to arrive. (His selflessness continued after the hoard was recovered and assessed. Cecio chose to forgo the discovery prize of 25% of the value of the find, about €6,250 in this case.)

The subsequent excavation found the rest of the coins and the ceramic vessel in which they were buried in the 1st century B.C. The discovery was kept secret while archaeologists catalogued, conserved and researched the treasure. The dates, quantity and consistency of denomination suggest it may have been the nest egg of a Roman legionary. Soldiers were paid in silver denarii, and 175 of them would have been a legionary’s pay for a year and a half.

The dates of the most recent coins suggest the hoard was buried in the turbulent era of the Social War (91-88 B.C.), when Rome’s former Italian allies revolted against it, and the subsequent civil war between the forces of Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla (83-82 B.C.). It was Gaius Marius who in 107 B.C. first pushed through the enlistment of the capite censi (the head count), the lowest class of Roman citizens who owned no property, in the army. A landless soldier who saved his pay may well have returned to the country with his nest egg planning to buy land or do business, only to bury it for safekeeping when things got hairy.

The hoard and pot are on display in a new exhibition at the Museum of Natural History of the Mediterranean in Livorno through July 2nd.