The battered lead disc above, the Moost Happi medal in the British Museum in London, Is the only remaining undisputed likeness of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII. After she was beheaded in 1536, there was a concerted effort to erase her memory. But an interdisciplinary team at the University of California, Riverside, may have resurrected another image of the queen. Using state-of-the-art facial recognition software, they have found a close match with the privately owned Nidd Hall portrait, held at the Bradford Art Galleries and Museums. Admits Amit Roy-Chowdhury, head of the video computing group, "What the computer gives at the end is another source of evidence for the discussions that have been going on about these questions.”
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Posted with BlogsySunday, January 25, 2015
Monumental error
Tourist Jacqueline Rodriguez, who snapped the photograph above, was one of many who were privvy to a sight that the Egyptian Museum in Cairo has just confirmed. In August of last year, the blue and gold beard on the mask of King Tutankhamun broke off during the cleaning of its display case. Rather then removing the precious artifact to the conservation lab, staff – on orders from above – simply glued it back on with epoxy. What has been done cannot be undone, so the mask now exhibits a yellow layer at the site of the break and scratches where misplaced epoxy was scraped away with a spatula. "The mask should have been taken to the conservation lab but they were in a rush to get it displayed quickly again and used this quick drying, irreversible material," said a museum conservator who was not consulted prior to the botched repair.
Saturday, December 27, 2014
H.M.S. holiday
Christmas Day 1833 found the crew of the H.M.S. Beagle playing a naval game called "Slinging the Monkey," which was something like human tetherball. The scene in Patagonia was captured for posterity by the ship’s artist, Conrad Martens, whose notebooks have been made available online by Cambridge University. Also being digitized are the diaries of Charles Darwin, who recorded that day, “After dining in the Gun-room, the officers & almost every man in the ship went on shore. – The Captain distributed prizes to the best runners, leapers, wrestlers. – These Olympic games were very amusing; it was quite delightful to see with what school-boy eagerness the seamen enjoyed them: old men with long beards & young men without any were playing like so many children. – certainly a much better way of passing Christmas day than the usual one, of every seaman getting as drunk as he possibly can.”
Friday, December 5, 2014
Zigzag
It was just 7 years ago that Dutch archaeologist Josephine Joordens of Leidens University noticed the scratchings in the mussel shell above. The faint etching of zigzags was found among a trove of fossils excavated in 1891 by Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois and dated to at least 430,000 years old. The implications of this are huge! Based on discovery of South African cave paintings made 70,000 to 100,000 years ago, the ability to create geometric art was thought to have begun with Homo sapiens and to mark behavioral modernity and cognitive uniqueness that later blossomed into creativity. But the markings on the shell were deliberately scratched by Homo erectus. Remarks American paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Pennsylvania State University, "This raises the big, hairy question of what is 'modern human behavior' all over again."
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Puzzling polyhedron
In the intervening centuries, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the strange 3-dimensional shape in the 1514 copper engraving by German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) entitled "Melencolia I." Was it intended to represent physics? Mathematics? Religion? Mathematician Günter M Ziegler of the Freie Universität Berlin ennumerates his favorite theories and tops the list with that of American mathematician and artist George Hart, who writes, “One might speculate that the cube represents masculinity and truncating one in an upright position may have some Freudian symbolism.”
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Water closet waterfall
A Chinese trade show for pottery and porcelain products has commissioned an art project. Composed of some 10,000 recycled toilet bowls, urinals, and sinks, the 328' (100 m) long and 16' (5 m) tall monstrosity will remain a permanent installation in Foshan, Guangdong Province.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Maria Merian
A newly-published book has brought much-deserved attention to 17th-18th c. German-born naturalist and scientific illustrator Maria Merian. Her lifework and drawings (IMAGE ABOVE, GALLERY HERE) helped dispel superstition about the "evil" origins of metamorphosis that caused butterflies to change from one form to another. Reviewer Maria Popova writes, "By meticulous and attentive observation, Merian proved that the process was very much a natural one, and beautifully so." This began when she was only 13 years old and continued even after a stroke had left her paralyzed.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Sphinx found
An Egyptian-style sphinx has been excavated… from the sands of Guadalupe, California, U.S. It is one of 21 that flanked the set of Cecil B DeMille's 1923 silent film "The Ten Commandments" (not the 1956 remake with Charlton Heston as Moses). After 90 years beneath the dunes, the sphinx needed special handling, which was good practice for the archaeology volunteers. To keep the paper-thin plaster of Paris from cracking, they wrapped it in cheesecloth soaked in a preservative chemical; funneled the sand out of the hollow statue and replaced it with expanding insulation foam; and allowed it to dry and shrink to its normal size (IMAGES HERE). That normal size of 15' (4.6 m) tall was dwarfed by the 12-story set. Executive director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center Doug Jenzen, who oversaw the excavation, explains that in the era before special effects, the movie required constructing one of the largest sets ever made: "...anything that they wanted to look large, they had to build large."
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Indonesian images
For decades, archaeologists have known about cave paintings (IMAGES HERE) on the island of Sulawesi east of Borneo. They were believed to have been created either by the region's first farmers a few thousand years ago or by hunter-gatherers around 8,000 years ago. But recent testing proves that they rival the images in Spain and France as the oldest cave art. Archaeologist and geochemist Maxime Aubert of Australia's Griffith University explains, "It was previously thought that Western Europe was the centerpiece of a 'symbolic explosion' in early human artistic activity, such as cave painting and other forms of image making, including figurative art, around 40,000 years ago. However, our findings show that cave art was made at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world at about the same time, suggesting these practices have deeper origins — perhaps in Africa before our species left this continent and spread across the globe."
Monday, October 13, 2014
Creativity nativity
The sculpture above, known as Der Löwenmensch (The Lion Man), was discovered in a German cave in 1939. It was carved out of mammoth ivory 40,000 years ago and marks a turning point in human evolution. When ancient artists made cave paintings and sculpted figurines, they were depicting things that already existed. In contrast, the Lion Man has the head of a lion but the body of a human – a creature which does not exist. The artist took 2 pieces of knowledge and combined them in his or her imagination, creating something unique which no human or other animal had ever seen. The figurine could then you have been used to describe the concept of a human-lion hybrid to others. Nick Skillicorn of Improvides Consulting Ltd. explains, "At it’s most fundamental level, this is human creativity in action. And this is the first example of it happening (until older examples may one day be unearthed."
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Scorching sculpture
This publicly-funded sculpture was given a place of honor in front of a Calgary recreation center, but has since been removed. A visitor had stepped inside the hollow hemispheres and thumbed a text message to the artwork, as encouraged. But as the artwork was translating the texted characters into a unique light and sound display, it was also focusing a beam of light on the visitor's jacket and began to burn a hole in it. Canadian taxpayers may or may not be out the $559,000 they paid for the piece and rec center president Carol Steiner is not happy about that or the fact that no one foresaw the potential problem. She is a former high school physics teacher and complains, "You put a spherical surface out there in the sun — what did you expect? And what really gets me is they said, ‘We had no idea.’ Really. They should have had an idea. I mean, an elementary physics student, year one, could figure that out, find the focal point of that mirror.”
Monday, September 29, 2014
Scrimshaw crimpers
"Seeing his appendage, I held out my ivory arm, and he his ivory leg, and it was as good a handshake between comrades as flesh itself ever pressed," recounts the one-armed Captain Boomer upon meeting the one-legget Captain Ahab in the historical novel I am reading, which is based on the classic Moby Dick. I wondered whether maimed whalers ever did carve prosthetic limbs from the bones of their prey. But a web search and an image search indicated that this idea is fictional. Instead, I found that 19th c. American whalemen spent their idle hours carving a myriad of pie crimpers to present to their mothers, wives, and sweethearts after their long sea voyages. As the examples above from the New Bedford Whaling Museum show, they are as fancy as the designs and edgings on the pies they were used to create. Scrimshaw crimpers. Say that 5 times real fast!
Monday, September 8, 2014
Collection cohesion
The Wedgewood Collection is more than just a bunch of pretty teacups. It is 80,000 pieces of pottery spanning 250 years of history and accompanied by documentation (manuscripts. letters, pattern books, and photographs) that is invaluable to scholars who study globalization, the spread of capitalism, and the industrial revolution. Those scholars, members of British Parliament, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Wedgewood family, and private donors are mobilizing to prevent the collection from being broken up and auctioned off due to the insolvency of Waterford Wedgwood Plc. Christie's has already designed and printed the catalogs in readiness. A total of £13.1 million has thus far been raised to retain the collection currently housed at the Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent and the final £2.74 million must be collected in the next 3 months. Chris Smith, chairman of the Art Fund which is coordinating the fundraising appeal, noted that the “clock is ticking” and director Stephan Deuchar called the impending dispersal the charity’s “worst nightmare.”
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Prehistoric hashtag
These marks in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar were made deliberately, by repeated scoring in the same direction with a robust cutting tip. Overlaying the rock engraving was undisturbed sediment in which 39,000-year-old Neanderthal artifacts had previously been discovered. Geochemical analysis of the mineral coating on the carved grooves also suggests that the sediment was deposited after the rock art had been created. Because modern humans – to whom all past cave art has been exclusively attributed – did not arrive in Western Europe until about 40,000 years ago, this surely means that the intellectually-maligned Neanderthals made the markings themselves and therefore had the capacity for abstract expression. Discoverer Ruth Blasco of the Gibraltar Museum and her colleagues state, "The results add to evidence at other sites that Neanderthal intellectual capacity may have previously been underestimated."
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Lord of Patients
In the church of San Bartolo Cuautlalpan in Zumpango, Mexico, stands a somewhat frightening, life-size, 300-year-old sculpture known as the "Lord of Patience." Until now, the lifelike statue of Christ has only left the church once a year to tour the town on Easter, but has now been removed to the National Institute of Anthropology and History to be restored. During that process, researchers have discovered that it has real human teeth (X-RAY HERE, VIDEO HERE). Because they had not been set apart in a separate shrine, it is highly unlikely that they are the relics of a saint. Instead it is assumed that the teeth were offered by a member of the church, since Mexican parishioners were known to have volunteered their hair and clothing for the creation of realistic statuary. Fanny Unikel, director of the School of Restoration, Conservation and Museology, points out, "It is common that the sculptures have teeth, but they are usually made of wood or bone carved individually or as a plate, but this case has eight teeth of an adult, you can even see to the root. The teeth were probably donated as a token of gratitude. It's the first time human teeth have been found in a sculpture."
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Mini Monet
Improving on a technique that can be used to store data or create small security tags on physical objects, scientists from Singapore have introduced "the first plasmonic palette utilizing color generation strategies for photorealistic printing with aluminum nanostructures." Translation: They used nanoscale silicon pillars topped with aluminium, which create ripples of electrons that release colored light of particular frequencies when the light strikes them, to reproduce a miniature of Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, the painting that gave the name to the impressionist movement. And by miniature, I mean just 300 micrometers (a.k.a. microns) across, a micrometer being one thousandth of a millimetrer (about 0.000039 of an inch), making this the world's smallest recreated masterpiece.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Whale surfaces
"It seemed a very unassuming painting depicting a very calm beach scene set in winter. There were clusters of people gathered. I was unclear why they were there, but it didn't seem too out of normal," says Shan Kuang, a conservation student at the University of Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum. She was tasked with removing the yellowed varnish from the 1641 Dutch painting "View of Scheveningen Sands" by Hendrick van Anthonissen. Her careful work with scalpel and solvent revealed a sperm whale that had washed up on the beach in The Hague (BEFORE AND AFTER IMAGES HERE). Researchers at the museum noted a surge in public interest in whales because of the many documented strandings on the coast of the Netherlands in the 17th c. In subsequent centuries, artists thought nothing of painting out dead animals or other images found to be offensive or inappropriate to where the painting was hung. Another case in point: a 17th c. Dutch painting in which a butchered pig was painted over!
Friday, June 6, 2014
Van Gogh grow
It's an installation at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. It's a work by U.S.-based artist Diemut Strebe entitled "Sugababe" that bridges art and science. It's an ear, specifically a replica of the ear that Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh hacked off. It conforms to the same shape as his through computer imaging technology. It is alive, grown from tissue-engineered cartilage grown at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. It contains genetic material from the van Gogh family. It was not hard to convince Lieuwe van Gogh, the great-great-grandson of Vincent's brother Theo, to donate cells for Strebe's use. It is relayed by her that "He loved the project right away."
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Totem taken
"[I]ts lovely warm browns and reds still glowing on the three great figures which compose its height. At the bottom a great bear-like creature, paws pleading; and on his head, a pale lean man who holds before him a gigantic fish which reaches from his shoulders to his toes; and on his head, hawk-nosed and savage, crouches a great bird, his tail behind him abristle with red feathers made of shingling." These are the words American actor Vincent Price used in an autobiography to describe the 25' (7.6 m) cedar totem pole that stood on the patio of his Beverly Hills mansion. Price and his former wife had acquired the Tlingit kooteeyaa in 1942 from American actor John Barrymore, who had also used it as a garden ornament until his death. During a journey on his yacht in 1931, Barrymore (PICTURED LEFT IN THE IMAGE ABOVE) had taken the pole from the abandoned village of Tuxecan on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska, U.S. In 1981, Price gifted it to the Honolulu Museum of art, where it has been in storage. Anthropology professor Steve Langdon of the University of Alaska Anchorage has pieced this history of the Tlingit totem – sacred to his people – together in hopes of getting it repatriated. In addition to its cultural value, it once held the bones of the dead, but where those are now is anyone's guess.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Recognized Rembrandt
A portrait (DETAIL ABOVE) of Dirck van Os III (1590-1668), a well-respected Dutch citizen, was purchased in 1942 from a private collection by the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. It hung on the wall for 45 years as the work of Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn, but was then demoted – believed to have been by a student of the master – and later placed in storage. In 2010, one of the world's foremost authorities on Rembrandt, Ernst van de Wetering, had a look and later asked that it be sent to Amsterdam for further analysis and conservation. That done, he has restored the painting's reputation as an original Rembrandt. Executive director of the museum Jack Becker understates, "It's unusual that it goes this way. It usually goes the other way. So that's exciting."
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