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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| So fifty years on the tapestries are found, in 1841, by Prosper Mérimée, the Inspector-General of Historical Monuments |
Hatty is being extremely arch here. She knows full well this is a prime qualification for forgers, eg the man who found the Franks Casket
| Professor Mathieu in 1835 presided over the commission to erect a monument in Gergovie to the glory of Vercingetorix |
and the man who found the provenance of the Franks Casket
| W H J Weale was a member of the Belgian Royal Commission for Monuments from 1861 on |
and who was big on large scale medieval art
| the ‘Donne Triptych’, ‘attributed to’ Hans Memling, was acquired by the National Gallery in 1957 from the Duke of Devonshire’s collection. Memling’s work became very popular in the 19th century and a fully illustrated biography was written by William Henry James Weale in 1901. |
The triptych consists of
| Courtier and soldier Sir John Donne kneels before the Virgin and Christ Child in the central panel of this triptych (a painting in three parts), which he commissioned, facing his wife Elizabeth and one of their daughters. With them are Saints Catherine and Barbara, two of the most popular medieval saints; the wings show Donne’s patron saints, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist. On the outside of the wings Saints Christopher and Anthony Abbot are shown as stone statues in niches. |
Sir John was a very lucky art collector
| The younger son of a Welsh soldier, Donne was a career administrator who owed his fortune to King Edward IV. He and his wife wear the King’s livery collars. The composition is a version of Memling’s famous Triptych of the Two Saints John (Memling Museum, Bruges), which he worked on in the late 1470s. Perhaps Donne saw it in Memling’s workshop and asked for something similar. |
I reckon it was the wife visiting the studio for some nookie and she nagged hubby into commissioning it so she had an excuse to keep popping back to see how it was getting on. So maybe Sir John was not so lucky after all. Unless they went in for triptychs.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Big news! Hatty didn't get banned. You be the judge. Here are the relevant bits in the Great Twitter Unicorn Tapestry Debate (the other bits comprised endless expressions of wonder, awe, and general thanksgiving)
| Journal of Art in Society wrote: | | From The Lady & the Unicorn series of Flemish wool & silk tapestries, woven c1500, rediscovered 1841 & popularised in George Sand’s novel ‘Jeanne’ ~ À Mon Seul Désir (= To My Only Desire). At R, details on themes of senses of Sight / & Smell |
Sight? Yes. Smell? Yes | Harriet Vered wrote: | | Rediscovered' in 1841. Hmm. Has the museum actually carbon dated any of the threads do you know? |
These two are old sparring partners
| Journal of Art in Society wrote: | | Hi Harriet, I don't know. Do you have anything to suggest that they not genuine, despite the extensive analysis of them, and bearing in mind their massive size and the huge amount of expertise involved in creating them? |
| Hatty wrote: | | Dating could be down to fashion said novelist George Sand, who "dated them to the end of the fifteenth century, using the ladies' costumes for reference". They were bought by the Musée de Cluny and "restored nearly to their former glory". O for a single thread for a carbon test. |
This whole thread is a paean to careful ignoral. Hatty is actually the first miscreant since she has carefully ignored the central point, who would fake such a massive undertaking? Her opponent returns the ball with his own careful ignoral spin
| Journal of Art in Society wrote: | | Obviously the dating does not depend on Sand's view. The separate, more fundamental, issue is how much restoration is too much? Opinions will inevitably differ widely on this |
Hatty smashes this footling comment back without breaking stride
| Harriet Federer wrote: | | Who, apart from Sand, decided the tapestry was made c. 1500? Did art historians and scholars pore over them before the Musée de Cluny snapped them up and, err, restored them? The earliest mention of the tapestries is 1841. |
The Journal of Art in Society picks up his barley water and walks off the court
| Journal of Art in Society wrote: | | Another little research project for you... |
to the accompaniment of threats
But someone else, someone rather more important, has taken advantage of this kind invitation...
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Musée de Cluny wrote: | | Carbon 14 technique was developed in the mid 20th c., long after the tapestries arrived in our collections. But they were of course analysed, first of all by Prosper Mérimée, Inspector General of Historic Monuments. Then, the analysis of the dyes used validated this dating. |
| Call Me Mr Harriet wrote: | | If later dye analysis was considered necessary to confirm Mérimée, why not use a more objective and cheaper test? Pigment analysis of medieval manuscripts has proved to be near-useless, as you know. |
The explanation takes one breath away
| Cluny wrote: | | Analysis was necessary to restore the tapestries, not to confirm a dating that is no doubt, whether in terms of the materials used, the weaving technique or the stylistic characteristics. The fact is: it also validated the dating. |
| The Hat in the Hat wrote: | | The dating has not been validated. Only confirmed by people commissioned by its present owners, who have a vested interest in a particular date. Even if it is genuine, proper scholarship demands a carbon test to show that 'c. 1500' is as accurate as is possible in the circumstances. You have the threads, I'll send you the money for the test. How about it? |
It's barley water time for the museum
| Cluny wrote: | Manipulating an artwork is not an innocent game. There's no need of carbon-14 analysis to know that the natural dyes and the weaving technique were not used in the 19th century. The traces visible with the naked eye of 19th century restorations attest to this. So, no thanks.
https://twitter.com/museecluny/status/1402212306721857538 |
| HV Negative wrote: | | I will draw my own conclusion. |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Notice that wondrous comment "the natural dyes and the weaving technique were not used in the 19th century". This is something we run into time and again. Everyone in the art world knows this so you would think everyone in the art forgery world would know it too. But that's the thing about scholarly experts: they assume because it has taken them all those years learning it, nobody else can learn it. By, say, reading their books.
Never forget the AE dictum: anything experts can recognise, a forger can forge. They're experts too.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I often wonder whether these museum curators are like Church of England vicars. Assailed by doubts but they turn up for work every week regardless. The sheer smugness of this particular curator -- and to be fair, every other curator I have ever heard from -- bespeaks that they are not. They are True Believers. Imagine someone is any normal line of work saying
| Manipulating an artwork is not an innocent game |
to someone who is referring to threads that are available because the artwork has been manipulated by them! As to whether establishing the authenticity of an important piece of European cultural history is an innocent game or not ... well, funnily enough I think it probably is. I regard the whole art business as being a bit of a shriek.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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When Morris was getting going he simply did not have the funds for machines for large scale manufacture. He actually aimed for a worn look to make the tapestries look older as that presumably was the market. Old money wants old. New money wants new, until they understand the profit in old.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Is this William Morris? Please do not be so all-knowing. If so, I had no idea he produced tapestries. Is there any suggestion he was offering stuff other than 'slightly foxed, school of Morris'? It is interesting how pre-Raphaelite the Unicorn tapestries are. This is a familiar pattern of fakes: they tend to be remarkably similar to whatever is fashionable when they are first 'found'.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So you considered thus several days ago but didn't have the time to tell us? Who are you -- Rishi Sunak? Well, I'm not going to be your Boris Johnson. Which reminds me, did Morris do wallpaper as well? Oh yes, before I forget and à propos the Cluny Museum curator, did he use 'ye olde dyes'?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Wiley wrote: | | I start with decoding the image. Morris was interested in heraldry. |
Blimey this Eco thing is getting way out of hand. Everybody is doing it.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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BBC Radio 4 seem to be repeating Neil MacGregor's hugely popular series, A History of the World in 100 Objects. An episode was aired after the 1 o'clock news featuring a Sri Lankan goddess called 'Tara' which started off with 'if you were a Sri Lankan in 800 A.D. you would probably have turned to Tara'.
Neil, the then-director of the British Museum, said the statue is so "dangerously erotic and voluptuous" that it wasn't displayed for thirty years. What changed after thirty years is not clear. Anyway, according to Neil the statue wasn't meant to be erotic/voluptuous but 'religious', a Buddhist goddess that "probably stood in a temple". So, circa 800 A.D., about a thousand+ years after Buddhism officially began, they apparently decided a goddess was needed 'to represent compassion and power' though Neil said relatively few would have had access to worhip at her shrine. Of course. That could explain why no records of Tara exist which gives rise to the usual kind of conjecturing. In this case he thinks
| she was buried at some point perhaps to avoid being looted by invaders and then melted down |
Handy because that could explain why dating and technique seem out of synch. In Neil's words, the statue is
...not only beatuiful but a remarkable techincal achievement and she must have been very very expensive
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but someone decided it was made around 800 A.D. even though gold and bronze are undateable and no ownership record is to hand
| We don't know who paid for Tara to be made |
But, we're told, the statue is very rare. In fact Neil says she is unique, no other statue of her exists. Ho hum. By now it's close to 2 o'clock. Get to the nitty, Neil, the afternoon game is due to kick off. As I'm about to rush off, he suddenly adds
| unfortunately nothing is known about how or when the statue was later found nor how it came to be owned by the then Governor of Ceylon, the soldier Sir Robert Brownrigg, who brought Tara to Britain |
Provenance should read : 'Made in Ceylon, 1830'
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It is noticeable that, when people have the world to choose from, they so often and so unerringly choose fakes. It never occurs to anyone that genuine stuff hardly ever survives (a) the vicissitudes of looting or (b) the ordinary mishaps of time and tide whereas (c) fakers unerringly know the kind of stuff people will just love to wax lyrical about.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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I wonder how many objects in the Secretum, part of the perverts Grand Tour, had a reliable provenance. Many were donated by George Witt.
| Witt emigrated to Australia and settled in Sydney in 1850 where he resumed his medical career. Within a short time however he was distracted to banking and speculation and at this occupation he made a fortune as a banker. Witt returned to the United Kingdom where he used his money to establish a new house near Hyde Park. Witt now began to put together a collection of what would have been considered obscene objects. Witt was not concerned with the detailed provenance of these objects and he collected both ancient and modern items.[4 |
The collection included modern photographs of women partially dressed as gladiators which were not thought to be academic artefacts but they were designed to be erotic. One of the artefacts was a toothed chastity belt which was thought to be medieval but was in fact a contemporary invention.[2]
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The collection was really designed for men of certain acquired tastes in exotic erotica, which couldn't be found elsewhere in Victorian England. How much of this was pagan? How much is pervert? I would offer to research this for AE, but they have emptied the Secretum out.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Old MacGregor's lyrical paeon to 'Tara' made me wonder about the carvings of another sexual and seemingly Irish female, referred to as a sheela-na-gig. Interpretations of the carvings are every bit as unfounded but seemingly plausible as musings on green men and Buddhist goddesses but how did sheelas survive the chisels of Cromwellian Puritans and later Victorian churchmen?
Wiki says the first written record of sheelas is dated 1840
The name was first published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 1840–1844, as a local name for a carving once present on a church gable wall in Rochestown, County Tipperary, Ireland; the name also was recorded in 1840 by John O'Donovan, an official of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, referring to a figure on Kiltinan Castle, County Tipperary.
Scholars disagree about the origin and meaning of the name in Ireland, as it is not directly translatable into Irish. |
Talking of Puritans, Kiltinan Castle, a Norman stronghold first recorded in 1199, got bombarded by Cromwellian troops in 1650 and subsequently
| was substantially remodelled by the Cooke family during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. |
Irish antiquarians visit the church and castle in 1840
When the members of the first ordnance survey of Ireland came to examine the parish of Kiltinan in 1840 they examined the remains of the church here. The first thing that they noticed was the good preservation of the church, which was built of limestone, lime and sand-mortar, and which had a square tower at the eastend. Writing on 18th October 1840, John O'Donovan, the leading Antiquarian with the Ordinance Survey, in his letter to the Director of the Survey says, ‘The figure spoken of is sculptured in a very rude style, on a corner stone in the west gable of the old Church of Kiltinan, near Fethard, which Church is not five centuries old.
Little or nothing is known about the rectors who exercised their practices in this little church. The first known is for 1220 when Robert de Vadis was the rector there years passed and by 1615, there was no Church and no curate. The church may well have been abandoned following Henry V111’s break with Rome. |
If a church is no longer in use a 'rude figure' would just be a common or garden graffito as in any abandoned site. Kiltinan castle became a racing stud in 1918 and bought by Andrew Lloyd Webber's family in 1996.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Kilpeck Church in Herefordshire is best known for its sheela figure. The church, built in or soon after 1140, fell into disrepair until it was 'refurbished' in the 1846 by Lewis Cottingham, pioneer of the 'Gothic Revival' movement in architecture
It was originally dedicated to a St David, probably a local Celtic holy man, and later acquired an additional dedication to Mary from the chapel at Kilpeck Castle after it had fallen into disrepair. At the time the current church was built, the area around Kilpeck, known as Archenfield, was relatively prosperous and strategically important, in the heart of the Welsh Marches. The economic decline of the area after the 14th century may have helped preserve features which would have been removed elsewhere. However, it is unclear why the carvings were not defaced by Puritans in the 17th century.
The church was substantially repaired in 1864, 1898 and 1962, and its unique features were protected and maintained. |
The assumption, shared by Wiki, is that the features are original. Everyone agrees on the church's "remarkable state of preservation" despite the passage of some five hundred years not to mention three goes at restoration. Hmm.
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