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.

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Minirdis' makeover

One of 30 ancient Egyptian mummies at Chicago’s Field Museum is being prepared for travel. Minirdis, the 14-year-old son of a priest who lived 2,500 years ago, has dates in Los Angeles and Denver as part of an upcoming exhibition, "Mummies: Images of the Afterlife." The specialists will repair the boy's shroud and mask (IMAGES HERE), which have been torn and twisted, and his feet (IMAGE ABOVE) which have been detached and partially unwrapped. As delicate as mummies are, conservator J.P. Brown reassures that this one won't crumble to dust as in the movies: “The last bit of Indiana Jones and all that. That’s not going to happen.”

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Plans to poach

It has recently been revealed that the National History Museum (NHM) in London had designs on the Loch Ness monster, appealing to bounty hunters to capture it (or pieces of it) to trump the Scots. An unnamed official wrote in 1934, a year after the first sighting, "Should you ever come within range of the ‘Monster’ I hope you will not be deterred 
by humanitarian considerations from shooting him on the 
spot and sending the carcase to us in cold storage, carriage forward. Short of this, a flipper, a jaw or a tooth would be very welcome.” By 1959 – long after the monster had become a symbol of Scottish national identity, NHM had given up its pursuit.

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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.”

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Rosamond, recorded

"I don't need subjects that are conventionally beautiful. With, say, a parrot, there's not much for me to figure out. Something that is obviously beautiful gets all the credit, and then I don't have to do much work. For example, skulls are fabulous. And bones have such a variety of shapes to suit specialized purposes. What I really like about a femur, for example, is the way it twists." ~ American photographer Rosamond Purcell, quoted in National Geographic. One of my favorite artists, she has spent her career photographing specimens behind the closed doors at museums. For instance, that is a trunkfish above from the Tradescant Collection, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, U.K. (SLIDESHOW HERE, VIDEO HERE).

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Unsanctioned souvenirs

While Pompeii has many larger issues of conservation, it doesn't help that international tourists feel free to walk away with a pocket- or purseful of the ancient ruins. It was happening in 1958 when an American mother swiped a brick (IMAGE ABOVE) which her son tried to sell on eBay earlier this year. And it is still happening today, with a French sightseer nabbed trying to take pieces of red plaster and fragments from an amphora handle, and a Georgian national attempting to steal tiles from a mosaic. Italian tour guide Giuseppe Galano explains how difficult it is to guard the open-air museum, especially during the peak summer season, and notes, “I question whether they would do the same thing at home. They know Pompeii is famous and they want a piece of it. Especially on the first Sunday of each month when the entrance is free. About 14,000 people passed through the gates last Sunday; how can you control that?”

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Lost museum

Felled by the arsenic used in his taxidermy, Brown University faculty member John Whipple Potter Jenks died in 1894 on the steps of the natural history museum he had founded on campus 23 years earlier. Because he did not believe in evolution, Jenks had become an anachronism to his younger colleagues and his museum soon fell into disarray. It was shuttered in 1915, and in 1945 most of the stored objects – 92 truckloads – were hauled unceremonially to the Seekonk River dump. Recently, a group of graduate students decided to resurrect and display some of the vanished objects. They received guidance from a faculty advisor and sought the help of Mark Dion, who became artist in residence during creation of the installation in the building that had housed the original museum. Because the accession logs had been destroyed in a fire, the rest of their research relied on photographs, descriptions, and the labels that had been used to describe the long-gone specimens. The resulting exhibit includes a recreation of Jenks’s office, as many of the original objects as they could find in other departments at Brown, and 88 sculptures by some 60 artists to stand in for the vanished museum objects, all of them painted white to unify them and symbolize their ghostly nature (IMAGE ABOVE). Student Lily Benedict says of the project, “You have a museum that is so organized and classified, and then it decays and random pieces of it get saved by chance, There’s a surreal quality to what’s left.”

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Morbid Anatomy Museum

Joanna Ebenstein's fascinating blog Morbid Anatomy is what inspired me to begin a blog of my own, and I told her so. While we never managed to meet before I moved to Florida, we have mutual admiration and more than a few friends in common. For years now, Joanna has opened her extensive library in Brooklyn, New York, to like-minded people, and has hosted lectures and workshops on subjects including post-mortem photography, 18th c. Italian anatomical waxes, and Victorian hair art. Now, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, she has moved her collection into larger quarters, added a special exhibition of daguerreotypes and paintings owned by writer and collector Stanley Burns, and officially opened to the public as of Friday night. At the corner of 3rd Avenue and 7th Street, you will be privvy to countless items of medical history and mourning culture ranging from the 18th to 20th centuries (PHOTOS HERE). But unlike your typical museum, not all of the items on display are labeled. Ebenstein explains to The Verge, "I like to experience the aesthetic and the feeling of it [without] imposing too much."

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Deas' ideas

A few years after his retirement, the former curator of the Sunderland Museum in Sunderland, U.K., had a brilliant notion. Beginning in 1913, John Alfred Charlton Deas arranged for the children from the Sunderland Council Blind School to handle a few of the collections, which included zoological specimens, sculptures and vases, antique armor and weapons, and skeletons (IMAGES HERE). The sessions were held when the museum was closed to the public, but docents provided information aloud and local experts expanded that with lectures. The children's teacher wrote, "With minds better stored than their predecessors, they ought to be keener observers, better workers and more intelligent citizens." Although the sessions were not widely imitated by other museums at the time, they were popular enough in Sunderland to extend them to blind adults. Let's hope they each were allowed to touch both ends of the walrus above or they may have brought a nursery rhyme to life!

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Dugout dug out

In another instance of a treasure being rediscovered inside a museum, a canoe that has been in the back of a display case at the Western Hennepin County Pioneer Association Museum in Minnesota, U.S., for 46 years has been found to be of more historical significance than previously thought. Believed to date to the 18th c., recent radiocarbon testing by Maritime Heritage Minnesota has revealed that the dugout canoe was crafted by Native Americans 1,000 years ago to navigate the state'ś lakes. The canoe was discovered in 1934 buried in mud in Lake Minnetonka and passed through various museums before it was acquired by the Pioneer Association in 1960. At least one major Minnesota institution now covets the piece, which has been moved to a more prominent spot, but museum president Russ Ferran declares, "We intend to keep it as long as we can protect it."

 

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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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X-ray fillet

Early in the morning, before patient appointments began, staff at the radiography department of England's Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital sent a fish through the x-ray machine (PHOTO HERE, X-RAY ABOVE). "D196b" is an ocean sunfish (Mola mola) caught in the local Exe Estuary, donated to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in Exeter, and prepared by its first curator, William D'Urban. The sunfish is usually found in tropical and temperate oceans, so it would have been a rarity when it was caught off the southwest coast of England 127 years ago (although that has now changed, probably because of global warming). Durham University student Susannah Bartindale is working to conserve the fish and needed to know about the placement of a large wire that had been inserted at some point in its history. She explains, “Having examined the x-ray, we believe that the piece of bent wire, looking rather like a coathanger, was probably used to hang the specimen, perhaps to display it on a wall. Now we’ve been able to see inside the fish, we know the wire is not part of an integral internal frame, so we can carefully remove it and repair the damage it’s caused so that this fascinating specimen can remain in the museum for future generations to study."

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Ole's objects

I have blogged before about Danish physician Ole Worm (1588-1655) and his cabinet curiosities (IMAGE ABOVE). Upon his death, the contents of his Museum Wormianum passed into the stewardship of the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen (now part of the Natural History Museum of Denmark) – but not all of them! NHM curator Kristian Gregersen was consulting a 1921 history of the zoological museum when he read that 90 years before the book's publication, and more than 170 years after Worm's death, a direct descendent offered further specimens to the Royal Museum, but the museum declined because they considered them to be of no particular interest. What is unknown is whether the descendant pursued further buyers or simply passed the items down to his heirs. Gregersen is doing his best to pursue the possibilities and exclaims, "It would be groundbreaking if there were more Worm specimens at large.”

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Digitized diseases

Diseases which we thought we had conquered are rearing their ugly heads. This includes polio, which is currently spreading in Syria. Martha Ann Lillard of Oklahoma offers herself up as a living reminder that an outbreak of polio anywhere in the world is a danger everywhere. Paralyzed at the age of 5 in 1953, she has survived ever since in an iron lung. If that's not scary enough, there is now an online resource that shows what happens when diseases are left unchecked. The 1,600 historical specimens of formerly incurable or untreatable diseases – including syphilis, rickets, and leprosy – have been digitized by the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The Digitized Diseases database is intended for archaeologists, interested laypersons, and medical clinicians who do not see such advanced cases in their practices. Andrew Wilson of the University of Bradford, who served as lead researcher on the project, notes, "If the vivid evidence of these bones flags up the importance of taking these conditions very seriously and tackling them early, so much the better."

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Op egg

Scotland-based photographer Sean Dooley was given unprecedented access by a small number of institutions (LIST HERE) to capture some of the rarest specimens in their collections. The result is a show called After Life, on exhibit through March 2nd of next year at the Horniman Museum & Gardens in south London. Dooley shares glimpses of endangered and extinct animal specimens locked in museum storage areas to show the undesired impact of our actions – and our inactions. One of these is the very precious and beautifully speckled egg of the great auk, which died out in the mid-19th c. One of only 75 or so in existence, this one resides in a high-security area behind the scenes at the National Museums Liverpool. His point is made in the photograph (IMAGE ABOVE), which is of course art and not documentation. Dooley comments, “The egg is rarely on display. It never leaves the box and no one is allowed to get too close, let alone touch it. The egg is so precious it’s rarely viewed, so it seemed right to restrict the view of the egg in the photograph as well.”

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Sponsor a skull

My favorite Mütter Museum, part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, U.S., has launched a fundraising campaign. The collection of 139 skulls they purchased from Viennese anatomist Joseph Hyrtl in 1874 for 6,410 Austrian thalers (about $4,800 at the time) is in need of conservation. By adopting a skull for an annual subscription of $200, your name will appear on a small plaque next to it. The skull of your choice will be cleaned, conserved, and remounted – important because the original cast-iron mounts are transmitting vibrations caused by visitors walking past the cases and damaging the contents. Each of the skulls has a story: a Moravian shoemaker's apprentice who killed himself out of remorse at the age of 17, a Tyrolean maidservant who died of meningitis, a Hungarian soldier who died of pneumonia, a Viennese prostitute, a notorious Thai criminal, and a tightrope walker who broke his neck. The skulls were originally obtained from poorhouses and prisons, and in one case from a graverobber. While some of the standouts have already been chosen, there are roughly 100 skulls still awaiting adoption...

 

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Amateurism and the Arabia

Another trove, this time in a cornfield in the Midwestern United States. Treasure hunters Bob Hawley and his sons consulted 19th c. maps and the manifest of a steamboat that sunk – with no casualties – in the Missouri River in 1856. They discovered the wreck just north of Kansas City in 1987, but it was no longer underwater due to meandering. In fact, the river's silt, which had buried the Arabia within weeks, preserved its contents in an ideal oxygen-free environment. The Hawleys realized what a haul they had when they began excavating the cargo:

• 20,000 feet of lumber
• 4,000 shoes and boots
• 2 prefab homes, plus window glass, locks, and door knobs
• a sawmill, its fixtures, and tools including axes, wood planes, and nails
• pistols, rifles, and hundreds of pocket knives
• thousands of assorted buttons and innumerable Indian trade beads
• bolts of cloth
• hundreds of beaver hats, pairs of pants, and dresses
• 3,000 tallow candles and whale-oil lamps
• pots, pans, muffin tins, and skillets
• spiced pigs' feet, sardines, pie fillings, and pickles
• kegs of ale, whiskey, and a case of Otard Dupuy & Co. cognac
• castor oil, Barrell's Indian Liniment, and dozens of medicine bottles
• luxury goods including perfumes, champagne, silk cloth, brandied cherries from France, and patterned porcelain tableware from England

Despite all their labor in bringing the items to the surface, the Hawleys realized they represented a virtual time capsule, so they decided rather than sell off their treasure, they would keep it together. While the U.S. curatorial and conservation establishment pooh-poohed their amateur efforts, they received advice from labs in Sweden, Canada, and the U.K. about how to process the objects they were keeping wet in huge tubs stored in caves and restaurant freezers. Rather than hiring museum design consultants, the family studied department store design to display the Arabia's goods (and her paddlewheel and boilers) in a museum that they built without any state or federal support. Welcome to the Steamboat Arabia Museum.

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Misidentified mammal

You may have seen pictures in the news recently of a newly found and very charismatic creature which lives in the cloud forests of the Andes in South America. While still exceedingly newsworthy because it is the first new mammal identified in the Americas in 35 years, the discovery of the olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina) occurred in a museum. Kristopher Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, was at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History scouring their collection for examples of the raccoon-like olingo (SLIDESHOW HERE). "...I pulled out a drawer, and there were these stunning, reddish-brown long-furred skins. They stopped me in my tracks—they weren't like any olingo that had been seen or described anywhere," he explains. He then pursued a new goal of meticulously cataloguing and examining the world’s olingo specimens and found after visiting 18 museums collections, which contained roughly 95% of the preserved fur and skulls, that nearly 2 dozen had been mislabeled. Helgen has now presented anatomical and DNA evidence to establish the olinguito as a separate species, but not before seeing one in the wild for himself. He and his colleagues made an expedition to Ecuador, with admirable results: "The very first evening, the very first night that we were there, there in the trees, maybe about 10 meters up, was the first olinguito that we were able to see."

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Roar

The MGM logo as we know it today is just the most recent incarnation of a brand which began in 1924, when the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio was formed. The photo above depicts an early filming of the mascot's roar (MORE IMAGES HERE), but there have in fact been several MGM "Leos," among them Slats, Jackie, Tanner, and George. The urban legend that the MGM lion killed its trainer and 2 assistants is false, and all of the lions used were handled by professionals without incident. In the 1920s and 1930s, MGM brought lions – some of them borrowed from local zoos – to movie premieres or publicity events. When one of these lions died, its skin was removed, tanned, and made into a rug. The taxidermy specimen made its way from Hollywood into the collection of a bank president in Kansas. Francis Vaniman displayed the prize on the 3rd floor of his home, which becamet the McPherson Museum after his death. The pelt had been spread across a table, but after it was found that visitors were pulling the hairs out, it was placed behind glass. Executive director Carla Barber divulges, "I can't say we know. You can research until you're dead and you'll never really know. But we're pretty sure we have an MGM Leo."

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Fingered

Some sculptures invite interaction: "The Awakening," formerly in Washington, D.C., and "Alice in Wonderland" in New York's Central Park. But an American tourist recently made international headlines when he touched a 14th c. marble sculpture while visiting the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence. He had spontaneously reached out to compare his hand with that of the Virgin Mary ("Vergine e all'Angelo Annunciatore" by Giovanni d'Ambrogio). He was immediately admonished by a security guard, but by then the little finger had come off exposing a metal rod inside. When questioned by police, he embarrassingly admitted what he had done and was not charged or asked by the museum to pay for the repair. In fact, the fragile fingers have been damaged and restored before and will be relatively easily repaired by the museum's full-time staff of restoration experts. Although the press was not satisfied until they had outed the offender, the lesson to be (re)learned is larger than this single offense. Fellow American Timothy Verdon, who heads the Diocesan Office of Sacred Art and Church Cultural Heritage and the Cathedral Foundation Museum in Florence, remarks, "He seemed to have forgotten the basic rule of museums that you don’t touch things."

 

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