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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Mick wrote: |
When you say 'oral tradition', how does this work exactly? By my reckoning it would need about fifty generations of vicars? school ma'ams? wiseacres in pubs? saying to fifty-one generations of children, "Hearken to my story. Our blessed St Mawes was born in a barrel after his mother was thrown off a cliff in that there France but got washed up in Ireland. Called in here on the way back though, he did. Aye, that he did. I'll have mine in a straight glass, if you wouldn't mind." |
It seems to me that much of this oral tradtion is not oral at all, it is simply the left over bits of a written tradition that did not make it into the official, church-approved Christian martyrology and calendars. It's the rediscovered discards. Still, studying rubbish in archaeology can be useful, why shouldn't studying this historical rubbish be useful, much of the official sacred stuff is equally bonkers.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| It seems to me that much of this oral tradtion is not oral at all, it is simply the left over bits of a written tradition that did not make it into the official, church-approved Christian martyrology and calendars. It's the rediscovered discards. |
The same thought occurred to me though I would be cautious about 'official church-approved Christian martyology'. I certainly wouldn't rule out Georgian and Victorian fantasists of various stripes. Or Tudors and Stuarts with political stripes.
| Still, studying rubbish in archaeology can be useful, why shouldn't studying this historical rubbish be useful |
There is a huge difference. One is true, however much it may be misinterpreted. The other is not 'historical rubbish' since we do not and cannot know when they originated, or by whom. It is just rubbish. It only becomes 'historical' when modern historians start citing it -- or better still start citing one another citing it.
| much of the official sacred stuff is equally bonkers. |
Funnily enough, it only occurred to me in the discussion with John Welford re St Mawes that the bonkers stuff is not just endearing, it is plain flat out pernicious bollocks that nobody would use even to entertain the children. "Mummy, mummy, tell us the one about being thrown off a cliff and going to Ireland in a barrel." Yet there it is. However, I often use "Creators of Universes impregnating Jewish women" et al as examples of what you can get several billion people to believe. Many with university degrees. Many flying the plane I'm in.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Here's a little morsel that deals obliquely with methodology, establishing provenance and take-up. It concerns one of our old faves so I'll leave the body aside https://medium.com/@johnwelford15/the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-a7defa2dc9a9 and cut to the quick
| John Welford in a medium.com offering wrote: | The Protocols of The Elders of Zion
A crude Tsarist hoax which has nonetheless proved to be probably the most dangerous slander in history
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | I hate to be technical, John (you know how I do) but it is not correct to say "the Protocols were quickly exposed as being a crude forgery". We just don't know one way or the other. It is anti-Semitic to say that Jews are incapable of producing crackpot conspiracies. |
| John Welford wrote: | | Mick, You are very quick to dismiss all sorts of things as forgeries, crude or otherwise, but the line "we just don't know one way or the other" could surely be applied just as easily? As it happens, there is a paper trail that leads to the originator of the Protocols, so the chances of them being genuine is absolutely zero anyway. |
| Mick Harper wrote: | You have unmasked the originator? That's good going, nobody else has. So you had better let the world know his/ her/ their name(s).
P.S. Just to clear up one point: we are discussing a document not a conspiracy. |
| John Welford wrote: | | Mick, Did you actually read my piece? - it's all there! |
| Mick Harper wrote: | "Ivanovich Rachkovsky is believed to have ordered the piece from Mathieu Golovinski... Later, Nilus acknowledged that the forgery had been planned by Rachkovsky."
I was misled by the word 'believe'. Nilus was the publisher of the pamphlet but of course if he actually knew it was the notoriously secretive head of the Okhrana who would never have confessed his part in it in a million years, then that puts a whole new complexion on the matter. Congratulations on your ground-breaking sleuthing.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Ovid wrote prodigiously during his banishment and although his work was mostly sad and often complaining, as a remote member of the same fraternity I find it hard to commiserate with him, writing lyric poetry on the shores of the Black Sea for the rest of one's life. Jan Morris "In My Mind's Eye" |
As another member of the fraternity this got me to thinking as well. Why would you write at all if you knew your audience would be limited to people who could afford to buy a handwritten copy of it? If it was, say, Revisionist Historiography, I doubt a single person would be prepared to buy a book for the equivalent of several thousand pounds when they are only going to read it once. Setting aside the sheer unlikelihood of anyone ever getting to hear about it. Unless I was a lyric poet, then I would be in with a chance for several reasons
1. A poetry book might contain say a thousand words -- as opposed to 100,000 words -- so the price of copying it would be much more reasonable.
2. People buy poetry books for constant re-reading, unlike massive tomes about historiography.
3. People declaim lyric poetry to audiences, unlike etc etc
Just saying that Ovid has more chance of being a Classical author than, say, Herodotus. We then only have to account for a prodigious number of his poems -- surely one per manuscript -- getting from the first century BC Black Sea to the twenty-first century AD Bodleian Library.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Ovid was banished by 5th century Christians for being the Andrew Davies of his Augustan day. They needed to demonstrate that Ovid's early mucky years had consequences, so post facto got Augustus to banish him. He was allowed to whinge on about it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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As opposed to fifteenth century humanists wanting to crash the mucky market outlawed by eleventh century Christians, without suffering the consequences? Your fifth century ones don't seem to have done a very good job banishing Ovid.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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When I post up a response on medium.com I usually get, say, two people registering that they looked at it, one of them actually reading it according to the algorithm, and nobody clapping it. In one of the more encouraging turn of events, when this appeared
and I dutifully replied, quoting one of Dillard's sentences
"We don’t actually know if Ptolemy made the maps he describes. If he did, we have no evidence of it"
To be strictly accurate we have no evidence that Ptolemy existed. Just Renaissance texts that said he did. |
I got seventeen people looking at it, all seventeen reading it and two (including George Dillard) clapping it. We're on the march!
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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How Did the Romans Map Their Empire? George Dillard
And why didn’t their maps look like ours? |
I think the answer to the second bit is the Romans didn't appreciate the strategic relevance of South Sandwich Islands.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Argentina must be cursing its entire existence was in an era when accurate maps were available. (Chile is relieved since they are mostly in possession of disputed territory.) However the Argies did have to rely on the British when occupying South Georgia. They could claim the Malvinas by dint of (a) propinquity and (b) their early maps included them but (c) had no claim whatsoever to South Georgia. However, since the British had lumped the Falklands and the South Sandwich islands together in a single administrative unit, suddenly they did!
Rejoice!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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There was a piece in medium that caught my attention
I posted up a routine reply
| Mick Harper wrote: | | I'm afraid you've been sold a pup, admittedly along with everyone else. A novella called Futility may have been published in the late nineteenth century -- its antecedents are decidedly murky -- but the 're-written' version of it called The Wreck of the Titan was brought out after the sinking of the Titanic. Always an advantage when writing these 'predictive' novels. |
This got an unusually friendly response
| Dan Spencer wrote: | | Thank you, Mick. Skeptic that I am, I’m inclined to agree with you. However, my research in writing the story - which I admit was not as thorough as it could have been - didn’t reveal literary fraud. Maybe you could point me toward some illuminating information…? Thanks. |
and as ever when someone is friendly, I obliged
| Mick Harper wrote: | If you look at Worldcat you'll find refences to the 1898 Futility though it appears nobody's got a copy of it. Only post-1912 reprints. It is not difficult to 'salt' the record, even print something with 1898 on the fly. Ordinarily nobody would go to such trouble because people don't buys book just because they're old. And there's not much profit in it even if they do. People have always bought books on the Titanic by the wagonload but there's no profit in that either -- too many books about the Titanic.
There's only one book though that predicted the Titanic's sinking in every eerie detail [the Titan, forsooth!] and that's been in print from that day to this. You do the math! Sorry if that's not very forensic but it boils down to whether you believe in clairvoyance or you believe in book-knavery. |
This reminded me to have a look at my own Titanic story on medium here https://medium.com/@mickxharper/the-titanic-sinks-again-e93b8122d658 and I pondered whether I should take it down because its general levity is inappropriate post-the recent tragedy. But I decided to keep it up on the grounds that, while it was a tragedy, the immediacy of it for all concerned meant it wasn't a long drawn-out tragedy. I'm still a bit uneasy though, the original piece is not that strong.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Quite an interesting exchange with John Welford on medium, showing the way intelligent, well-informed people treat public art in general
As you might imagine I'd never heard of the painting and I was only barely aware of the artist. I won't go into the details you can look at the original post but the salient bits are these
Andrea Mantegna was born in 1431 in the small village of Isola de Carturo in northern Italy. His father, Biagio, was a carpenter. In his paintings, Mantegna combined an imaginative use of antique forms with a technical virtuosity which made him extremely sought-after. Mantegna was no mere dilettante however — he had a sound archaeological knowledge and a special interest in classical inscriptions, an interest which endeared him to his patron. Mantegna worked under three successive rulers at the Gonzaga Court. He died there in 1506, a famous and venerated man.
The Agony In The Garden probably dates from his Padua days, in around 1455, and is one of two fairly similar depictions of the subject by Mantegna, both deriving from a drawing by his father-in-law, Jacopo Bellini. The painting, tempera on wood, measures 25x31.5 inches (63x80 cm) and can be seen in the National Gallery, London |
I looked it up on the National Gallery website and then on Wiki which resulted in
| Mick Harper wrote: | | It's a fake. Do you want to tell the National Gallery or shall I? |
| John Welford wrote: | | You need to explain that! |
| Mick Harper wrote: | I wish you hadn't asked me that, John, I've only been investigating since lunchtime! Broadly it is because of the difficulty of tracing a provenance for the painting before c 1850. For such a well-known artist this is, to put it mildly, surprising. But when you run into the sheer volume of 'Old Masters' that the source, William Coningham, claimed to have amassed, the surprise turns into ... um ... something else.
As you will know from Revisionist Historiography, the national collections in London at this time were in the hands of crooks. As you will also know by now, our present-day curators are extremely reluctant to enquire into why they are custodians of such prodigious quantities of other countries' heritages. We didn't loot this little lot! |
| John Welford wrote: | | There is surely a huge gap between "this painting could be a fake" and "this painting is a fake". Apart from that, the painting in question is entirely typical of Mantegna's work and will have been subject to very close examination by experts down the centuries - any suspicion of fakery would have been voiced long before now. |
| Mick Harper wrote: | | Everything in life is 'could', John. I am satisfied this is a fake. I think you'll find fakers tend to paint pictures that are entirely typical of the work of the artist they are faking. I'm afraid you are wholly wrong about 'close examination by experts down the centuries'. Once a picture is accepted by a prestigious gallery, that's it. An Old Master may be closely examined for all kinds of reasons but being faked is not one of them. |
| John Welford wrote: | I would like to know what you mean by "fake". It does sometimes happen that a painting is mis-attributed, and there are many cases in which it turns out that a painting was a "joint enterprise" - the named artist was not wholly responsible for the work, or it was done in his studio but by one or more pupils. However, that would not make the painting a "fake". Surely, fake paintings are created by much later artists who execute a work in the style of a named artist and then sell them off for a huge sum of a money on that basis.
So is that what you are saying about "The Agony in the Garden"? It was bought by the National Gallery in 1894 (i.e. nothing to do with Peter Cunningham or William Coningham) which had bought or been bequeathed other Mantegnas during that century. Are you suggesting that the others are also fakes? Mantegna has a very distinctive painting style, which any reputable art historian would be able to spot, and also be able to question if there was any suspicion of fakery. The painting has been in full view of every professor and student of art history in London (and there have been thousands of them!) for well over a century. I would have thought that any doubts about its authenticity would have emerged long before now if there was any cause to express them. |
| Mick Harper wrote: | | Yes, John, that is exactly what I am saying. If you think that being 'in full view of every professor and student of art history' makes a ha'pence of difference you will have to explain why more reputable experts than me admit that between a third and a half of all publicly exhibited paintings are 'probably fake'. To use their careful phrase.  |
I should add, entre nous, that John's reference to Peter Cunningham shows he has at least read parts of Revisionist Historiography -- he's the dude responsible for the 'Samuel Pepys' pic in the National Portrait Gallery. I did not say William Coningham supplied the National Gallery only that he is the source of a British nineteenth century cascade of 'Old Masters'.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| John Welford later wrote: | | That still does not explain why you are so sure that this particular painting was created at some time between the death of Mantegna (1506) and 1894, reproducing his highly unusual techniques so carefully that it has raised absolutely no suspicious eyebrows in the meantime? One might also point out that - even if this work was not by Mantegna - it still deserves its place in the National Gallery for its brilliance as it stands. |
| Mick Harper wrote: | | I won't rehash my reasons though I too am pleased that such a fine work is there for all to see. |
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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How come you're so much nicer to him than you are to me? :-D
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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It sounds like a Mantegna - Bellini family affair. The National Gallery isn't quite sure if the drawing was the work of Andrea Mantegna or of Jacopo Bellini
| This painting dates from early in Mantegna’s career when he was still in Padua, near Venice, where he trained. The image might be based upon a drawing by his father-in-law, Jacopo Bellini, now in the British Museum. |
Jacopo Bellini was the famous painter, or at least the one who inspired 'reproductions'
| Jacopo Bellini, for example, led to the emergence of many disciples in Italy |
https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2018/12/14/the-art-of-reproducing-paintings.html.
But it isn't clear how Jacopo was so influential and/or gained so many disciples if, as Wiki says, 'few of Bellini's paintings exist'
Jacopo Bellini (c. 1400 – c. 1470) was one of the founders of the Renaissance style of painting in Venice and northern Italy. His sons Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and his son-in-law Andrea Mantegna, were also famous painters.
Few of Bellini's paintings still exist, but his surviving sketch-books (one in the British Museum and one in the Louvre) show an interest in landscape and elaborate architectural design and are his most important legacy. |
There's really very little known about the few paintings attributed to Jacopo
| Many of his greatest works, including the enormous Crucifixion in the cathedral of Verona (1436), have disappeared. From c. 1430 is the panel with Madonna and Child, in the Accademia Carrara, once attributed to Gentile da Fabriano. In 1441, at Ferrara, where he was at the service of Leonello d'Este together with Leon Battista Alberti, he executed a portrait of that Marquess, now lost. Of this period survives the Madonna dell'Umiltà , probably commissioned by one of the brothers of Leonello |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacopo_Bellini
Doubts have been raised about the relationships, whether it was a Bellini father-son or a Bellini brothers set-up, assuming Jacopo was not Giovanni's father but his 'much elder brother'
| Giovanni Bellini (Italian pronunciation: [dÊ’oˈvanni belˈliËni];[1][2] c. 1430 – 29 November 1516)[3] was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. He was raised in the household of Jacopo Bellini, formerly thought to have been his father, but now that familial generational relationship is questioned.[4] An older brother, Gentile Bellini was more highly regarded than Giovanni during his lifetime, but the reverse is true today. His brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna. |
All this probably is of no help but what caught my eye was the NG explaining that the Agony in the Garden is an early work and was painted in Padua which is quite a remarkable stroke of luck as little else seems to have survived the 1944 bombings of Padua
Mantegna's first work, now lost, was an altarpiece for the church of Santa Sofia in 1448. The same year he was called, together with Nicolò Pizolo, to work with a large group of painters entrusted with the decoration of the Ovetari Chapel in the transept of the church of the Eremitani. It is probable, however, that before this time some of the pupils of Squarcione, including Mantegna, had already begun the series of frescoes in the chapel of S. Cristoforo, in the church of Sant'Agostino degli Eremitani, which are today considered a masterpiece. After a series of coincidences, Mantegna finished most of the work alone, though Ansuino, who collaborated with Mantegna in the Ovetari Chapel, brought his style from the Forlì school of painting. The now critical Squarcione carped about the earlier works of this series, illustrating the life of St James; he said the figures were like men made of stone, and should have been painted stone color.[4]
This series was almost entirely lost in the 1944 Allied bombings of Padua. |
Just as well then that one of Mantegna's brothers-in-law did the exact same painting which also survived and is also in the NG collection
| Jacopo’s son, Giovanni Bellini, made a painting of The Agony in the Garden (also in the National Gallery’s collection), based upon Mantegna’s image. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It was the 'family' aspect that first caught my nostrils. So many Elders and Youngers... we all know what that means. But then it was all the disappearances. Not surprising when you are a fresco man but a tremendous attraction for fakers 'filling in' lost works. Though it was this William Conningham chap that I fell in love with at first sight. Anything known? One day someone will make an inventory
| Old Masters, Where Are They Now? |
Once you take out Italy (and maybe the Netherlands) the scale of our knavery will be exposed. Though my own in putting myself forward as a Mantegna authority after ninety seconds must be rigorously suppressed.
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