The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Reconstructed with Artificial Intelligence

in Art, History, Technology | June 25th, 2021

Most of us know Rem­brandt’s mas­ter­piece by the name The Night Watch, but it has a longer orig­i­nal title: Mili­tia Com­pa­ny of Dis­trict II under the Com­mand of Cap­tain Frans Ban­ninck Cocq. By the same token, the ver­sion of the paint­ing we’ve all seen — what­ev­er we hap­pen to call it — is small­er than the one Rem­brandt orig­i­nal­ly paint­ed in 1642. “In 1715, the mon­u­men­tal can­vas was cut down on all four sides to fit onto a wall between two doors in Amsterdam’s Town Hall,” writes The New York Times’ Nina Sie­gal. “The snipped pieces were lost. Since the 19th cen­tu­ry, the trimmed paint­ing has been housed in the Rijksmu­se­um, where it is dis­played as the museum’s cen­ter­piece, at the focal point of its Gallery of Hon­or.”

In recent years, the Rijksmu­se­um has hon­ored The Night Watch fur­ther with a thor­ough­go­ing restora­tion called Oper­a­tion Night Watch. This ambi­tious under­tak­ing has so far pro­duced attrac­tions like the largest and most detailed pho­to­graph of the paint­ing ever tak­en, zoom-in-able to the indi­vid­ual brush­stroke.

That phase required high imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy, to be sure, but it may appear down­right con­ven­tion­al com­pared to the just-unveiled recre­ation of the work’s three-cen­turies-miss­ing pieces, which will hang on all four sides of the orig­i­nal at the Rijksmu­se­um for the next three months. This mak­ing-whole would­n’t have been pos­si­ble with­out a small copy made in the 17th cen­tu­ry — or the lat­est arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence tech­nol­o­gy of the 21st.

Image cour­tesy of the Rijksmu­se­um

“Rather than hir­ing a painter to recon­struct the miss­ing pieces, the museum’s senior sci­en­tist, Robert Erd­mann, trained a com­put­er to recre­ate them pix­el by pix­el in Rembrandt’s style,” writes Sie­gal. Erd­mann used “a rel­a­tive­ly new tech­nol­o­gy known as con­vo­lu­tion­al neur­al net­works, a class of arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence algo­rithms designed to help com­put­ers make sense of images.” The process, explained in more detail by Shan­ti Escalante-De Mat­tei at ART­News, involved dig­i­tal­ly “split­ting up the paint­ing into thou­sands of tiles and plac­ing match­ing tiles from both the orig­i­nal and the copy side-by-side,” train­ing mul­ti­ple neur­al net­works to com­plete the paint­ing in a style as close as pos­si­ble to Rem­brandt’s rather than the copy­ist’s. The result, with a few new faces as well as a star­tling­ly dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion­al feel than the Night Watch we’ve all seen, would no doubt please Cap­tain Ban­ninck Cocq and his mili­ti­a­men: this, after all, is the por­trait they paid for.

You can watch videos on this Rijksmu­se­um page show­ing how the clas­sic paint­ing was restored.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece

The Restora­tion of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstak­ing Process On-Site and Online

The Largest & Most Detailed Pho­to­graph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

All the Rem­brandts: The Rijksmu­se­um Puts All 400 Rem­brandts It Owns on Dis­play for the First Time

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

AI & X‑Rays Recov­er Lost Art­works Under­neath Paint­ings by Picas­so & Modigliani

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Radical Gardeners Took Back New York City

in Environment, History, Nature, Travel | June 25th, 2021

New York­ers’ rela­tion­ship to New York City com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens is large­ly informed by how long we’ve lived here.

Do you remem­ber the 60s, when a fis­cal cri­sis and white flight result­ed in thou­sands of vacant lots and aban­doned build­ings in low income neigh­bor­hoods?

Activists like Hat­tie Carthan and Liz Christy sprung from such soil, cre­at­ing youth pro­grams, haul­ing away debris, and putting con­stant pres­sure on elect­ed offi­cials to trans­form those urban waste­lands into green oases.

Ver­dant sites like the Bow­ery Hous­ton Com­mu­ni­ty Farm and Gar­den (now known as the Liz Christy Gar­den) improved air qual­i­ty, low­ered tem­per­a­tures, and offered a pleas­ant gath­er­ing place for neigh­bors of all ages.

In the ‘80s, the city boast­ed 1000 com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens, most­ly in neigh­bor­hoods con­sid­ered blight­ed. School aged chil­dren learned how to plant, tend, and har­vest veg­eta­bles. Immi­grant mem­bers intro­duced seeds new to Amer­i­can-born gar­den­ers, to help com­bat both home­sick­ness and food inse­cu­ri­ty. On site arts pro­grams flour­ished. There were al fres­co birth­day par­ties, con­certs, movie screen­ings, hol­i­day cel­e­bra­tions, per­ma­cul­ture class­es, com­mu­ni­ty meet­ings…. Gar­dens became focal points for com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment. Par­tic­i­pants were under­stand­ably proud, and invest­ed in what they’d built.

As Yon­nette Flem­ing, founder of the com­mu­ni­ty-led mar­ket at the Hat­tie Carthan Com­mu­ni­ty Gar­den and Farmer’s Mar­ket, says in the above episode of Vox’s Miss­ing Chap­ter: “Com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens grow com­mu­ni­ties, for the peo­ple, to be run by the peo­ple, for the ben­e­fit of the peo­ple.”

In the mid-90s, new­ly elect­ed May­or Rudy Giu­liani sided with devel­op­ers over cit­i­zens. More than half of the city’s gar­dens were bull­dozed to make way for lux­u­ry res­i­dences.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly low-rise neigh­bor­hoods like the East Vil­lage and Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuyvesant would become increas­ing­ly fash­ion­able dur­ing the ear­ly days of the new mil­len­ni­um. New arrivals with lit­tle inter­est in neigh­bor­hood his­to­ry might assume that the side­walks had always been lined with cute cafes and hip­ster bars, not to men­tion trees. (In real­i­ty, Carthan was 64 when she began her suc­cess­ful cam­paign to line Bed-Stuy with trees, and land­mark a ven­er­a­ble Mag­no­lia that was at risk of being torn down.)

Per­haps hop­ing to com­mand younger view­ers’ atten­tion, Vox’s Miss­ing Chap­ter opens not with the rich his­to­ry of New York City’s com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens, but rather the many recipes for seed bombs on Tik­Tok. The glass half full per­spec­tive on our 500-strong sur­viv­ing gar­dens can ring a bit emp­ty to those who lost the fight to pre­serve a num­ber of East Harlem gar­dens just a few short years ago.

Don’t for­get your roots! Christy’s type­writ­ten, hand illus­trat­ed Green Gueril­las recipe for seed bombs is below. (If you want to try it at home, please use seeds native to your area.)

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A New Inter­ac­tive Map Shows All Four Mil­lion Build­ings That Exist­ed in New York City from 1939 to 1941

Behold the New York City Street Tree Map: An Inter­ac­tive Map That Cat­a­logues the 700,000 Trees Shad­ing the Streets of New York City

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.) 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Artistic & Mystical World of Tarot: See Decks by Salvador Dalí, Aleister Crowley, H.R. Giger & More

in Art, Games, History | June 24th, 2021

The tarot goes back to Italy of the late Mid­dle Ages. Every day here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, I see unde­ni­able signs of its cul­tur­al and tem­po­ral tran­scen­dence: specif­i­cal­ly, the tarot shops doing busi­ness here and there along the streets of Seoul, where I live. The tarot began as a deck for play, but these aren’t deal­ers in card-gam­ing sup­plies; rather, their pro­pri­etors use tarot decks to pro­vide cus­tomers sug­ges­tions about their des­tiny and advice on what to do in the future. Over the past five or six cen­turies, the pur­pose of the tarot many have changed, but its orig­i­nal artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty — dra­mat­ic, sym­bol-laden, and high­ly sub­ject to coun­ter­in­tu­itive inter­pre­ta­tion — has remained intact.

You can get an idea of that orig­i­nal artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty by tak­ing a look at the the Sola-Bus­ca, the old­est known com­plete deck of tarot cards. Dat­ing from the 1490s, it holds obvi­ous his­tor­i­cal inter­est, but it’s hard­ly the only tarot deck we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

Artists of sub­se­quent eras, up to and includ­ing our own, have cre­at­ed spe­cial decks in accor­dance with their dis­tinc­tive visions. The unstop­pable sur­re­al­ist Sal­vador Dalí designed his own, a project embarked upon at the behest of James Bond film pro­duc­er Albert Broc­coli. Lat­er, the mas­ter of bio­mech­anism H.R. Giger received a tarot com­mis­sion as well; though his deck uses pre­vi­ous­ly unpub­lished rather than cus­tom-made art, it all looks sur­pris­ing­ly, some­times chill­ing­ly fit­ting.

The world’s most pop­u­lar tarot deck was designed not by a famous artist, but by an illus­tra­tor named Pamela Cole­man-Smith. Many more have used and appre­ci­at­ed her work than even, say, the Thoth deck, designed by no less renowned an occultist than Aleis­ter Crow­ley, “the wickedest man in the world.” If you won’t take his word for it, per­haps the founder of ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy can sell you on the mer­its of tarot: for Carl Jung, the deck held out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the “intu­itive method” he sought for “under­stand­ing the flow of life, pos­si­bly even pre­dict­ing future events, at all events lend­ing itself to the read­ing of the con­di­tions of the present moment.” (See his deck here.) Even if you’re not in search of such a method, few oth­er arti­facts weave togeth­er so many threads of art, phi­los­o­phy, his­to­ry, and sym­bol­ism. Of course, no few mod­ern enthu­si­asts find in it the same appeal as did those ear­ly tarot play­ers of the 15th cen­tu­ry: it’s fun.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet the For­got­ten Female Artist Behind the World’s Most Pop­u­lar Tarot Deck (1909)

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

The Thoth Tarot Deck Designed by Famed Occultist Aleis­ter Crow­ley

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

Divine Decks: A Visu­al His­to­ry of Tarot: The First Com­pre­hen­sive Sur­vey of Tarot Gets Pub­lished by Taschen

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Every Roman Emperor: A Video Timeline Moving from Augustus to the Byzantine Empire’s Last Ruler, Constantine XI

in History | June 24th, 2021

Famed Roman ora­tor and con­sul Cicero is cel­e­brat­ed as a staunch defend­er of the Repub­lic, and of tra­di­tion­al Roman moral­i­ty and civic virtues. He was also a shrewd oppor­tunist who sur­vived the Republic’s demise and lived to tell about it, although he sup­port­ed Julius Cae­sar’s rival Pom­pey in the con­test for con­trol of Rome. When Cae­sar became a dic­ta­tor, he for­gave Cicero. And when Cae­sar was mur­dered, Cicero applaud­ed:

Our tyrant deserved his death for hav­ing made an excep­tion of the one thing that was the black­est crime of all… here you have a man who was ambi­tious to be king of the Roman Peo­ple and mas­ter of the whole world; and he achieved it! The man who main­tains that such an ambi­tion is moral­ly right is a mad­man, for he jus­ti­fies the destruc­tion of law and lib­er­ty and thinks their hideous and detestable sup­pres­sion glo­ri­ous…. All hon­est men killed Cae­sar… some lacked design, some courage, some oppor­tu­ni­ty: none lacked the will. 

Cicero then attached him­self to Cae­sar’s great-nephew and named suc­ces­sor, Octa­vian, the future Augus­tus, Rome’s first emper­or. “The elder states­man was extreme­ly flat­tered to have Octa­vian ‘total­ly devot­ed to me,’” José Miguel Baños writes at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. “He became con­vinced that an alliance with Octa­vian might help to destroy [Mark] Antony’s polit­i­cal aspi­ra­tions.” This time, Cicero backed the right dic­ta­tor. Nonethe­less, before com­mit­ting sui­cide with his lover Cleopa­tra, Antony had the great ora­tor behead­ed. It was “the moment,” writes Baños, “the Roman Repub­lic tru­ly died.”

Cicero’s death, and Augus­tus’ ascen­sion, marked the birth of the Roman Empire, ruled by a suc­ces­sion of emper­ors — or some­times two, three, or even six or sev­en emper­ors. Many of these are renowned, right­ly or wrong­ly, for their deca­dence and hedo­nism. Caligu­la, Nero, Com­modus have all become vil­lains in fea­ture films. Some were philoso­phers, like Mar­cus Aure­lius; some were teenagers, like Heli­o­ga­balus, who reigned from age 14 to age 18, when he was mur­dered by his own Prae­to­ri­an guard, and Romu­lus Augus­tu­lus, the last of the West­ern emper­ors, who ascend­ed at age 12, a proxy for his father, and was deposed by Ger­man gen­er­al Odoac­er in 476 AD.

The Empire con­tin­ued for anoth­er 1000 years of Chris­t­ian rule in the East, first under Con­stan­tine, in Con­stan­tino­ple (now Istan­bul), which had been named Byzan­tium; hence Rome became the Byzan­tine Empire. The video above shows a time­line of every Roman emper­or from Augus­tus to the very last ruler of the East­ern Empire, Con­stan­tine XI Palaiol­o­gos, who sur­ren­dered Con­stan­tino­ple in 1453 to Ottoman Sul­tan Mehmet II.

The Empire had final­ly fall­en, 1500 years after Cicero warned of the Republic’s demise. Before his army’s defeat, the last Byzan­tine Emper­or gave a speech to “the descen­dants of the Greeks and Romans.”

I can tell you that this city mas­tered the entire uni­verse; She placed beneath her feet Pon­tus, Arme­nia, Paphlag­o­nia, The Ama­zon­ian lands, Cap­pado­cia, Gala­tia, Media, Geor­gian Colchis, Bospho­ros, Alba­nia, Syr­ia, Cili­cia, Mesopotamia, Phoeni­cia, Pales­tine, Ara­bia, Judea, Bac­tria, Scythia, Mace­do­nia, Thes­saly, Boeo­tia, Locris, Aeto­lia, Arcar­na­nia, Achaea, the Pelo­pon­nese, Epirus, Illyr­ia, Lykhnites, the Adri­at­ic, Italy, Tus­cany, the Celts, and Gala­t­ian Celts, Spain up to Cadiz, Libya, Mau­ri­ta­nia, Ethiopia, Beledes, Scude, Numidia, Africa and Egypt.

Con­sid­er, said the last emper­or, “my broth­ers and com­rades in arms, how the com­mem­o­ra­tion of our death, our mem­o­ry, fame and free­dom can be ren­dered eter­nal.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What Did the Roman Emper­ors Look Like?: See Pho­to­re­al­is­tic Por­traits Cre­at­ed with Machine Learn­ing

Hear an Ancient Chi­nese His­to­ri­an Describe The Roman Empire (and Oth­er Voic­es of the Past)

The Chang­ing Land­scape of Ancient Rome: A Free Online Course from Sapien­za Uni­ver­si­ty of Rome 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Painting?: An Explanation in 15 Minutes

in Art, History | June 17th, 2021

The Mona Lisa may be on dis­play at the Lou­vre, but best of luck appre­ci­at­ing it there. The first obsta­cle, quite lit­er­al­ly, is the crowd that’s always massed around it (or, in the time before social-dis­tanc­ing poli­cies, was always massed around it). Even if you maneu­ver your way to the front of the cam­era-phoned throng, the paint­ing itself hangs with­in a thick glass case — can’t have a repeat of the 1911 theft — and has dimen­sions in any event much small­er than peo­ple tend to imag­ine. After all, we come to know Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s most famous paint­ing through cul­tur­al ref­er­ence and par­o­dy, but also through large-scale repro­duc­tion, the bet­ter to under­stand the painstak­ing and inno­v­a­tive artis­tic labor that makes the Mona Lisa worth flock­ing to in the first place.

Still, there are those who come away from the Mona Lisa — assum­ing they can man­age to get back out through the mass of human­i­ty — won­der­ing what all the fuss is about. It was for them, pre­sum­ably, that cura­tor James Payne chose that paint­ing as the first sub­ject of his Youtube series Great Art Explained.

As he would in his sub­se­quent episodes (such as his three-part series, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, about Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights), Payne casts off the accu­mu­lat­ed his­tor­i­cal spec­u­la­tion and oth­er var­i­ous forms of cul­tur­al bag­gage to find the work’s artis­tic core. In the case of the Mona Lisa, not just “the great­est psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait ever paint­ed” but “the end prod­uct of the great­est inquis­i­tive mind in his­to­ry,” that still leaves much to dis­cuss.

In under fif­teen min­utes, Payne explains a host of the tech­niques Leonar­do employed in paint­ing the Mona Lisa that no artist of his time and place had used before — and indeed, that in some cas­es no oth­er artists mas­tered until long there­after. These include work­ing on top of an under-lay­er of white paint that appears to be “light­ing Mona Lisa from with­in,” strip­ping his sub­ject of “all the usu­al high-sta­tus sym­bols” usu­al­ly seen in aris­to­crat­ic por­trai­ture, depict­ing her at three-quar­ters length rather than in full frame, mak­ing the back­ground fade into the dis­tance while also sug­gest­ing motion, and com­bin­ing the tech­niques of low-con­trast sfu­ma­to and high-con­trast chiaroscuro. And only a painter with Leonar­do’s anatom­i­cal knowl­edge could have exe­cut­ed that famous­ly sub­tle smile, which appears and van­ish­es again depend­ing on which part of the Mona Lisa we look at — no mat­ter whether we’re doing it at the Lou­vre or on Youtube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Mona Lisa Went From Being Bare­ly Known, to Sud­den­ly the Most Famous Paint­ing in the World (1911)

Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Paint a First Mona Lisa Before The Mona Lisa?

Orig­i­nal Por­trait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Lay­ers of da Vinci’s Mas­ter­piece

When Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire Were Accused of Steal­ing the Mona Lisa (1911)

Mark Twain Skew­ers Great Works of Art: The Mona Lisa (“a Smoked Had­dock!”), The Last Sup­per (“a Mourn­ful Wreck”) & More

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch an Accurate Reconstruction of the World’s Oldest Computer, the 2,200 Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, from Start to Finish

in Astronomy, History, Science | June 14th, 2021

There’s noth­ing like an ancient mys­tery, espe­cial­ly one as seem­ing­ly insol­u­ble as the ori­gins of “the world’s first com­put­er,” the Antikythera mech­a­nism. Dis­cov­ered off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the cor­rod­ed col­lec­tion of gears and dials seemed fake to sci­en­tists at first because of its inge­nious­ness. It has since been dat­ed to 100 to 150 BC and has inspired decades of research and spec­u­la­tive recon­struc­tion. Yet, no one knows who made it, and more impor­tant­ly, no one knows how it was made.

“The dis­tance between this device’s com­plex­i­ty and oth­ers made at the same time is infi­nite,” says Adam Woj­cik, a mate­ri­als sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don. “Frankly, there is noth­ing like it that has ever been found. It’s out of this world.”

The expres­sion should not make us think of ancient aliens — the Antikythera mech­a­nism con­tains more than enough evi­dence of human lim­i­ta­tion, show­ing a geo­cen­tric mod­el of the cos­mos with the only five plan­ets its mak­er would have known.

The 2,000-plus year-old device con­tin­ues to reveal its secrets, includ­ing hid­den inscrip­tions found dur­ing CT scans of the object, as Smith­son­ian report­ed in 2015. The mech­a­nism is “sim­i­lar in size to a man­tel clock, and bits of wood found on the frag­ments sug­gest it was housed in a wood­en case. Like a clock, the case would’ve had a large cir­cu­lar face with rotat­ing hands. There was a knob or han­dle on the side, for wind­ing the mech­a­nism for­ward or back­ward. And as the knob turned, trains of inter­lock­ing gear­wheels drove at least sev­en hands at var­i­ous speeds. Instead of hours and min­utes, the hands dis­played celes­tial time.”

If the Antikythera mech­a­nism is a “celes­tial clock,” who bet­ter to design and build its recon­struc­tion than a clock­mak­er? That is exact­ly what we see in the videos above, cre­at­ed for the clock­mak­ing YouTube chan­nel Click­spring. Using the best sci­en­tif­ic mod­el of the mech­a­nism to date — pub­lished this year by Dr. Tony Freeth and col­leagues of the Antikythera Mech­a­nism Research Project — Click­spring shows how the device might have fit togeth­er and makes edu­cat­ed guess­es about the right place­ment of its dozens of small parts.

You can see a pre­view of the Antikythera recon­struc­tion project at the top, watch the full project above, and see indi­vid­ual episodes show­cas­ing dif­fer­ent phas­es of con­struc­tion on YouTube. The mod­el “con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence,” Freeth writes, “and match­es the descrip­tions in the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself.” What no one can fig­ure out, how­ev­er, is just how the ancient Greek arti­sans who made it shaped pre­ci­sion met­al parts with­out lath­es and oth­er mod­ern tools of the machine-mak­ers trade. Researchers, and clock­mak­ers, may have pieced togeth­er the Antikythera puz­zle, but the mys­tery of how it came into exis­tence at all remains unsolved.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Researchers Devel­op a Dig­i­tal Mod­el of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, “the World’s First Com­put­er”

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Age of Cathedrals: A Free Online Course from Yale University

in Art, History, Online Courses | June 13th, 2021

Image by Rafes­mar, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

From Yale pro­fes­sor Howard Bloch comes Age of Cathe­drals, an online course that offers “an intro­duc­tion to some of the most aston­ish­ing archi­tec­tur­al mon­u­ments the world has ever known—Gothic cathe­drals,” includ­ing Notre Dame, Chartres, and Saint-Denis. The course descrip­tion adds: “We shall study the art, lit­er­a­ture, intel­lec­tu­al life, eco­nom­ics, and new social arrange­ments that arose in the shad­ow of the cathe­drals and that were such an impor­tant part of the revival of cities in the twelfth and thir­teenth cen­turies. The goal of the course is a bet­ter appre­ci­a­tion of the High Mid­dle Ages, a world that is still rec­og­niz­ably our own.”

You can take Age of Cathe­drals for free by select­ing the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a cer­tifi­cate, you will need to pay a fee.

Age of Cathe­drals has been added to our list of Free His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enroll in Harvard’s Free Online Archi­tec­ture Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the His­to­ry & The­o­ry of Archi­tec­ture

Mak­ing Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from the IE School of Archi­tec­ture and Design

Euro­pean Paint­ings: From Leonar­do to Rem­brandt to Goya–A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­dad Car­los III de Madrid (UC3M

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

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Hear the Amati “King” Cello, the Oldest Known Cello in Existence (c. 1560)

in History, Music | June 11th, 2021

The Stradi­vari fam­i­ly has received all of the pop­u­lar acclaim for per­fect­ing the vio­lin. But we should know the name Amati — in whose Cre­mona work­shop Anto­nio Stradi­vari appren­ticed in the 17th cen­tu­ry. The vio­lin-mak­ing fam­i­ly was immense­ly impor­tant to the refine­ment of clas­si­cal instru­ments. “Born around 1505,” writes Jor­dan Smith at CMuse, founder Andrea Amati “is con­sid­ered the father of mod­ern vio­lin­mak­ing. He made major steps for­ward in improv­ing the design of vio­lins, includ­ing through the devel­op­ment of sound-holes” into their now-famil­iar f‑shape.

Among Amati’s cre­ations is the so-called “King” cel­lo, made in the mid-1500s, part of a set of 38 stringed instru­ments dec­o­rat­ed and “paint­ed in the style of Limo­ges porce­lain” for the court of King Charles IX of France.

The instru­ment is now the old­est known cel­lo and “one of the few Amati instru­ments still in exis­tence.” And yet, call­ing the “King” a cel­lo is a bit of a his­tor­i­cal stretch. “The ter­mi­nol­o­gy refer­ring to the ear­ly forms of cel­lo is con­vo­lut­ed and incon­sis­tent,” Matthew Zeller notes at the Strad. “Andrea Amati would like­ly have referred to the ‘King’ as the bas­so (bass vio­lin).”

Images cour­tesy of Nation­al Music Muse­um

The instru­ment remained in the French court until the French Rev­o­lu­tion, after which the bas­so fell out of favor and the “King” was “dras­ti­cal­ly reduced in size” through an alter­ation process that “stood at the fore­front of musi­cal instru­ment devel­op­ment dur­ing the last quar­ter of the 18th cen­tu­ry and through­out the 19th,” a way trans­form obso­lete forms into those more suit­able for con­tem­po­rary music. “By 1801,” Zeller writes, “the date that the ‘King’ might have been reduced, large-for­mat bas­sos were obso­lete, dis­card­ed in favour of the small­er-bod­ied cel­los.”

Zeller has stud­ied the exten­sive alter­ation of the “King” cel­lo (includ­ing a new neck and enlarge­ment from three strings to four) with CT scans of its joints and exam­i­na­tions of now-dis­tort­ed dec­o­ra­tions. The reduc­tion means we can­not hear its orig­i­nal glo­ry — and it was, by all accounts, a glo­ri­ous instru­ment, “a mem­ber of a larg­er fam­i­ly of instru­ments of fixed mea­sure­ments relat­ed togeth­er by pro­found math­e­mat­i­cal, geo­met­ri­cal, and acousti­cal rela­tion­ships of size and tone,” writes Yale con­ser­va­tor Andrew Dip­per, “which gave the set the abil­i­ty to per­form, in uni­son, some of the world’s first orches­tral music for bowed strings.”

We can, how­ev­er, hear the “King” cel­lo (briefly, at the top) in its cur­rent (cir­ca 1801), form, and it still sounds stun­ning. Cel­list Joshua Koesten­baum vis­it­ed the cel­lo at its home in the Nation­al Music Muse­um in Ver­mil­lion, South Dako­ta in 2005 to play it. “It didn’t take much effort to find the instrument’s nat­u­ral­ly sweet, warm sound,” he says. “It was incred­i­bly easy to play — com­fort­able, plea­sur­able, for­giv­ing, and user-friend­ly…. I felt at home.” Learn more about the lat­est research on the “King” cel­lo at Google Arts & Cul­ture and the Strad.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Watch Price­less 17-Cen­tu­ry Stradi­var­ius and Amati Vio­lins Get Tak­en for a Test Dri­ve by Pro­fes­sion­al Vio­lin­ists

Watch the Mak­ing of a Hand-Craft­ed Vio­lin, from Start to Fin­ish, in a Beau­ti­ful­ly-Shot Doc­u­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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