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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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'Fitzstephen' means the illegitimate son of Stephen, the king before Becket's childhood friend Henry II. Either he knew Becket personally or someone later thought it was an ideal nom de plume.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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I didn't think of that but, now you have raised it as an ideal nom de plume, how about "son" of Saint Stephen, ie the first or original martyr.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Sorry but this is so bogus I don't even have the will to conjure with it. God help us all if this sort of thing is passing muster.
| Unlike William fitz Stephen's work on London, De laude Cestrie concentrates on religious rather than secular aspects of his chosen town.[11] Lucian describes Chester via Biblical parallels; according to Barrett, "the city's streets and buildings become scripture made manifest."[23] Faulkner describes the text as "perhaps the fullest application of this Neo-Platonic theology to survive from the Middle Ages."[11] Barrett and Keith D. Lilley highlight several instances where Lucian distorts Chester's geography to suit his rhetorical purposes.[19] |
According to us the Roman Lucian didn't exist till the Reformation so taking his name for this production would be pre-sumptuous.
| This caught my eye. Great fire eyewitness eh? Lucian gives an apparently eye-witness account of the fire of 1180, which he states was extinguished when St Werburgh's shrine was carried in procession through the streets. |
Very useful for disappearing Anglo-Saxon stuff.
| I am not really buying this, date-wise. |
What date you might buy would depend on when these sorts of thing become a la mode. I'd plump for Tudor or Victorian as favourites.
Still, I would like to think this is true, especially the Welsh bit below. It seems it's an aerial view from the city walls?
‘Chester has four gates corresponding to the four winds: from the East it looks towards India; from the West towards Ireland; from the North to greater Normandy; from the South to the place where God's severity left the Welsh a narrow corner to punish their innate rebelliousness’. |
Looking at it from a later forger's perspective they would know not to mention America (despite St Brendan). I doubt India would be on the lips of a twelfth century savant but it's not totally out of the question. Wales isn't to the south of Chester but Chester is, I suppose, a narrow corner of it. What Greater Normandy is doing to the north is anyone's guess (a small indication of authenticity even). I don't know what Greater Normandy is unless it's some reference to the Angevins. Maybe even England. Possibly a reference to the Harrowing of the North. Like I say, I haven't got the will to enter such a hall of mirrors.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Saints can't have illegitimate sons.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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I am still going with this Fitzstephen = St Stephen
| Becket gave his clerk full authority to act in his name in diocesan matters. Fitzstephen became a subdeacon with responsibility for perusing letters and petitions involving the diocese. |
| Stephen is first mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles as one of the Seven Deacons, who were appointed by the Apostles to distribute food and charitable aid to poorer members of the community in the early church. According to Orthodox belief, he was the eldest and is therefore called "archdeacon" |
Fitzstephen was ahead of his time.
| ‘The only plagues of London are the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires’ wrote William Fitz Stephen in his account of the city in the 12th century. |
After the Great Fire of 1666 (sic) when the city began to rebuild, a law ordered that “no man whatsoever shall presume to erect any house or building, whether great or small, but of brick or stone.” If they did, their house would be pulled down.
St Stephen, the patron saint of bricklayers and stone masons, would certainly approve of all this.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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According to ortho Great Plague London (1665) was followed by Great Fire of London (1666). At the time, Robert Hubert confessed to starting the Great fire of London in Westminster. He only later changed this confession to starting the fire by use of grenade at Pudding Lane. His confession is now thought false, but he was executed.
This has certain parallels with the Gunpowder Plot (1605) which occurred at the time of another plague in London, which is thought to have killed around 30,000.
If you believe ortho, the stinking air known as miasma was thought at the time to be a cause of the plague.
The major London diarist other than "Pepys" that writes about The Great Fire (also known for his fascination with clean air, trees, gardens, open space, etc) is John Evelyn (a founding member, like Wren, of the Royal Society), whose family actually made their fortune making and selling gunpowder. Evelyn was one of those who thought Hubert's confession was true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Evelyn
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Because reports seemed largely limited to Pepys and Evelyn we once toyed with the notion that the Fire itself was iffy. Either never happened or a town planning initiative gone wrong ...er... gone right.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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To ward away the miasma, (the dominant paradigm, germ thory not having been discovered) different methods were tried. Public health measures called for large fires to be burned in the streets. These could be of scented woods like juniper, ash, oak or pine. Large barrels of tar were set alight.. Smoking of tobacco was recommended to all including children. In particular, those responsible for clearing waste would smoke. Gunpowder was also considered an effective purifier, resulting in regular firing of guns and cannons to disperse the miasma in the air.
The origin of Bonfire night.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Good spot, if true. It was unfortunate that killing cats and dogs was also favoured if the reported cause--rats' fleas--was the cause.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The start of a series on Medium when I get the chance.
Announcing a new competition from the fecund pen of Mick Harper. It is designed to hone your skills at spotting fake historical sources. This is usually quite straightforward if you are looking for them. Historians rely on such sources for their living and therefore tend not to be looking.
We’re going to start with an easy one. It is lifted from the Wiki page of a well-known historical figure of the eighteenth century (slightly modified by me to remove giveaways as to who it is). The Wiki piece was written by an academic specialist on that person and has gone through all the usual Wiki hoops from other experts. It contains six clues that tell you the whole thing is phoney. See if you can do better than the experts by spotting at least one.
| As a child, X suffered nosebleeds, and his grandmother sought help from a witch: “We enter a hovel, where we find an old woman sitting on a pallet, with a black cat in her arms and five or six others around her.” [Quote taken from X’s autobiography.] Though the unguent applied was ineffective, X was fascinated by the incantation. Perhaps to remedy the nosebleeds (a physician blamed the density of the local air), X was sent, on his ninth birthday, to a boarding house in a different town. |
This is an example of one of applied epistemologists favourite maxims: ‘People in the past are remarkably like people in the present.’ Everyone supposes they are not and therefore all kinds of swindles can be perpetrated because the reader (and the Wiki compiler) shrugs and thinks to themselves
| “Oh, well, you know what they were like in the eighteenth century.” |
Actually they were remarkably like you, so to spot the ‘errors’ (they may not all be) you become X temporarily. Then you will speedily spot the bogus bits not spotted by Wiki:
1. Can you recall a childhood visit to a medical practitioner with this degree of compelling detail? X was writing some seventy years after the event.
2. Did nosebleeds require consultations with medical practitioners during your childhood? Or is it the sort of thing you might make up if you wanted to include a childhood meeting with ‘a witch’ in your autobiography?
3. Do you recall being sent to both an orthodox and an alternative practitioner about any of your childhood afflictions? You may do it as an adult quite a lot, but as children… not so much. Notice it’s ‘granny’ aka some dotty carer. Is your grandmother dotty?
4. Does any doctor, to your knowledge, believe one town’s air is of a different density to that of another town. Have you ever heard of such a theory ever being put forward? You have heard vaguely about ‘miasmas’ and so forth, so this one just slips through effortlessly.
5. Were any medical remedies, in your childhood experience, applied on birthdays? Obviously not. This tells you some other, perhaps more mundane, event is being described.
6. How often did a health issue involve you being dispatched to another town and placed in the care of strangers? Never, so this tells you X is probably being sent off to a boarding school at the usual age but for whatever reason X is intent on turning it into something more dramatic. Though Wiki believes him.
Well done! Another test will be along anon. Though not well done the academics—there are several thousand words of such drivel breathlessly reported as fact on the Wikipage and in all the standard biographies of X – he is very famous despite never having existed at all.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Paintings! Luvverly Paintings!
Part One of your guide to making money out of them.
I have written about fakes in museums and art galleries for a good many years and I’ve got pretty good at spotting red and green flags even if I do say so myself. But one thing kept eluding me. Again and again I would come across fakes that had been donated to the public by some philanthropist or other and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why.
| Since the philanthropists weren’t making anything out of it, why did they so often end up donating fakes to the public? |
The only explanation I could come up with was that grasping businessmen who had made their money fleecing the public were so anxious to be loved by giving the public free art, they were easy marks for fakers.
You’re right, it wasn’t very satisfactory to me either. People like that are not easy marks for anyone and they have the resources to buy in enough expertise to make sure they weren’t. It was only when I was listening to a BBC radio series the other day about The Museum of the Bible in Washington DC that the penny dropped. (The Museum of the Bible has been making my jaw drop ever since it opened but that is for another day.)
| It’s all to do with tax breaks. |
Of course I knew that if you donate works of art to a public institution you get a dollar-for-dollar reduction to your tax bill but that does not in itself explain anything. From a tax-paying point of view, there is no difference between buying an Old Master and donating it to the Metropolitan and just paying the same sum direct to the Revenue.
What I hadn’t known (because it’s so weird nobody would) is that it is not what you paid for the Old Master that gets deducted, it is the current value. And that makes all the difference. This is how the scam works.
1. A faker (Mr A) knocks up an Old Master in his kitchen. It takes him a few hours to paint plus a couple of days to age it. Then a few more days putting together the provenance — the documentation that shows it was painted by Punchinello the Younger for the Doge of Padua during the Italian Renaissance and then all the hands the painting has passed through since.
2. His partner-in-crime (Mr B) gives Mr A a thousand dollars and tells him to make a few more. He places the Punchinello in his prestigious commercial art gallery ostensibly for sale but contacts his friend (Mr C) who does all the art purchasing for the Hiram P Seersucker Foundation (you know him from Seersuckers’ Sauces).
3. Mr C buys the painting from Mr B for ten thousand dollars but asks for no receipt at this stage. “I’ll let you know.” He then gets in touch with Mr D, professor of art history at Gotham University, and asks him to authenticate a painting that has recently come into his possession and to provide a valuation.
4. Although Professor D is an accredited expert on Punchinello père et fils (he’s written a book about them and everything) he knows bananarama about art forgery. He says it could be a Punchinello, possibly the Younger, but more likely School of Punchinello, and is worth a million bucks. "The last one of this quality that came onto the market went for half a million and that was some years ago.” Mr C gives Professor D five hundred dollars, his usual fee. He is quite sought after.
5. Mr C places the painting in the Seersucker vaults and gets on the blower to the art critic of the Gotham Times and says isn’t it about time the Punchinello studio, and that whole period when Padua was king of the hill, got a bit of attention? The AC/GT gets to work.
6. Mr C approaches the director of the Gotham Museum of Fine Art and says Padua’s getting a bit of traction, what about an exhibition? “Well, yes, that piece in the Times has been getting a lot of attention but we’ve only got one on show, and that’s an attribution. Plus some lesser stuff in the basement.” “Don’t worry about that, there are several major works in the Seersucker Collection.” “Really? And I know for a fact quite a few would be available on loan from other galleries. An exhibition does rather enhance these relatively neglected minor artists. Let’s talk again.”
We shall see how the fakes end up on the walls of the Gotham and the dosh ends up in the fatman’s wallet next time.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Paintings! Luvverly Paintings! (2)
How many people have a vested interest in finding out whether a painting is a fake? One, the person buying it.
You have to remember that a fake is indistinguishable from the real thing. Oftentimes, better. A faker has the same technical skills as the original artist — probably better if the painting is an old one — but can choose the subject and will make sure it is what the market wants.
The public are just as happy gazing fondly at a fake Old Master as a genuine one. The city fathers are just as proud their local gallery has a real live Old Master as a forged one. The gallery staff look after it with the same professional care either way. The art history department at the local university is only too glad there is a handy Old Master for their students to write essays about.
Of course, all this is true so long as nobody knows the actual status of the painting. But unless someone is being asked to write a cheque for it, nobody has any reason to carry out the kind of forensic tests required to find out. In fact, they have a vested interest in not finding out.
If you have an Old Master on your wall and you decide to let science decide whether it is genuine or not, there are only two possible outcomes:
1. It is genuine and you’ve just spent a whole heap of money finding out what everyone knew in the first place. What a prize Charlie you are.
2. It is a fake and you’ve just lost a gigantic heap of money, not to mention being shown up as a prize Charlie for buying it.
That is why you make damn sure it is genuine before you buy it. Mistakes can be made but it won’t be for your want of trying. Unless you are a zillionaire working the Art Donor Scam.
Zillionaire’s art buyer: My employer has decided to donate his collection to the nation, are you interested?
Chairman of Trustees: Yes.
Art buyer: We shall need a valuation for tax purposes.
Chairman: We can do that.
Zillionaire’s accountant: Here are the valuation certificates you asked for.
Tax authorities: Looks like he won’t be paying taxes for some time.
Now you’re probably thinking the zillionaire is not a prize Charlie and would have made damn sure all his paintings were genuine before authorising their purchase. But where’s the profit in that?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| In 1800 Madison's list of over three hundred titles [for the Library of Congress] included the great Enlightenment Bible, Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie méthodologique in 192 volumes... Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books. |
Grim news for me personally. I claimed in RevHist it did not exist at this time. One down, a thousand to go. If true. I'm not prepared to let it go just on Tricky Dick's say so. Any help gratefully received.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Paintings! Luvverly Paintings! (3)
The neatest thing about the Art Donor scam is nobody has done anything wrong.
Very much the reverse.
Mr A, the faker, was no such thing. He was an excellent pasticheur.
“I was doing a style-of-Punchinello for hanging up in your living room. I can do any of the old timers. I got a thousand dollars for this one as I recall. More than my going rate but it was a nice little work. You don’t really think little old me is going to fool the world’s experts, risk serious jail time and do it all for a grand, do you? I don’t know nothing about no provenance. A modern copy doesn’t need one.”
Mr B, the fakes dealer, was no such thing. He was a retailer with an eye for the main chance.
“A chap came in with what he said was a Punchinello copy but I saw straight off it could be the real deal. I gave him a grand for it and shuffled him out of the shop quick as. I can assure you we don’t pay four figures for copies. We don’t sell copies, period, in this establishment. I hung it up to see what gives. A bloke from the Seersucker Foundation offered me ten grand. As seen. I bit his hand off. I wish I’d bitten my own hand off now it’s turned out to be a genuine Punchinello but that’s the way it goes in this business.”
Mr C, the criminal mastermind, was no such thing. He was his boss’s eyes and ears.
“I saw what looked like a Punchinello in a reputable downtown dealer’s and took a punt on it. For ten grand it wasn’t even a punt, Hiram likes anything vaguely Renaissance. Just to look at. Even a repro, he’s not blessed with a good eye. But I took it to an expert for a second opinion.”
Professor D, the art expert, was no such thing.
“I got a call from the Seersucker Foundation about a possible Punchinello. I thought it was a fine work. I didn’t think it was by either of the Punchinellos — the brushwork, you know. I told them ‘School of’, as far as I remember. I couldn’t do any serious forensic examination, it was a five hundred dollar sight-only appraisal.”
The art critic was an excellent journalist with an eye for a story.
“The Seersucker had acquired a Punchinello and offered to let me get ahead of the pack by breaking the news.”
The Museum bigwig was a very good Museum bigwig.
“Our Padua Exhibition was a terrific success. Selling the brochures alone brought in a small fortune. Not only that but it led to the Seersucker Foundation donating us all his Punchinellos. We’ve got a Hiram P Seersucker Room now.”
The taxman was a very good taxman.
“Thanks to me this country is a magnet for scholars of an important part of the Italian Renaissance. Soft power, I believe it’s called.”
Someone did fake that provenance. What fake provenance? It’s a genuine Punchinello. The paperwork’s disappeared now anyway, so we’ll never know.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | What I hadn’t known (because it’s so weird nobody would) is that it is not what you paid for the Old Master that gets deducted, it is the current value. And that makes all the difference. This is how the scam works. |
This is really cool!
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