“We should fear Grant Wood. Every artist and every school of artists should be afraid of him, for his devastating satire.” Gertrude Stein wrote those words after seeing American Gothic, the 1930 painting that would become one of the most iconic images created in the United States. Yet Wood himself “said he painted American Gothic to extol rural American values, real people in their well-ordered world: an image of reassurance during the onset of the Great Depression.” That’s how Art History School host Paul Priestley puts it in the video above, which asks of the painting, “Is it a satire, or a positive statement of American rural life?”
It could be neither; then again, it could be both. That very ambiguity goes some way to explaining American Gothic’s success — as well as its persistence in the culture through frequent and unceasing parody. Yet in its day, the painting also angered some of its viewers: “An Iowan farmer’s wife who’d seen the picture in the papers in 1930 telephoned Wood to express her anger,” says Priestly.
“She claimed she wished to come over and smash his head for depicting her countrymen as grim Bible-thumpers.” Wood maintained that he was one of them, “dressing in rugged overalls after the painting was completed and telling the press, ‘All the really good ideas I’d ever had come to me while I was milking a cow.’
Yet Wood was no farmer. A son of Cedar Rapids, he traveled extensively to Europe to study Impressionism and post-Impressionism. There he first saw the work of Jan van Eyck, whose combination of visual clarity and complexity inspired him to develop the signature look and feel of the movement that would come to be known as Regionalism. He became “half European artiste, half Iowan farm boy,” as Vox’s Phil Edwards puts it in the video just above, all the better to straddle his homeland’s widening divide between town and country. “In 1880, almost half of all Americans were on the farm,” but by 1920 more than half the population lived in cities. American Gothic came a decade later, and most of a century thereafter, it still makes Americans ask themselves — earnestly or sardonically — just what kind of people they are.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
The exalted status of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is reflected by the fact that everybody knows it as, simply, the Principia. Very few of us, by contrast, speak of the Historia when we mean to refer to John Ray and Francis Willughby’s De Historia Piscium, which came out in 1686, the year before the Principia. Both books were published by the Royal Society, and as it happens, the formidable cost of Willughby and Ray’s lavish work of ichthyology nearly kept Newton’s groundbreaking treatise on motion and gravitation from the printing press.
According to the Royal Society’s web site, “Ray and Willughby’s Historia did not prove to be the publishing sensation that the Fellows had hoped and the book nearly bankrupted the Society. This meant that the Society was unable to meet its promise to support the publication of Isaac Newton’s masterpiece.”
Fortunately, “it was saved from obscurity by Edmund Halley, then Clerk at the Royal Society” — and now better known for his eponymous comet — “who raised the funds to publish the work, providing much of the money from his own pocket. ”
Halley’s great reward, in lieu of the salary the Royal Society could no longer pay, was a pile of unsold copies of De Historia Piscium. That may not have been quite the insult it sounds like, given that the book represented a triumph of production and design in its day. You can see a copy in the episode of Adam Savage’s Tested at the top of the post, and you can closely examine its imagery at your leisure in the digital archive of the Royal Society. In the words of Jonathan Ashmore, Chair of the Royal Society’s Library Committee, a browsing session should help us “appreciate why early Fellows of the Royal Society were so impressed by Willughby’s stunning illustrations of piscine natural history.”
Though Savage duly marvels at the Royal Society’s copy of the Historia — a reconstruction made up of pages long ago cut out and sold separately, as was once common practice with books with pictures suitable for framing — it’s clear that much of the motivation for his visit came from the prospect of close proximity to Newtoniana, up to and including the man’s death mask. But then, Newton lays fair claim to being the most important scientist who ever lived, and the Principia to being the most important science book ever written. Almost three and a half centuries later, physics still holds mysteries for generations of Newton’s successors to solve. But then, so do the depths of the ocean.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
They’re almost an endangered species, the victim of the Internet, postal rate increases, and the jettisoning of any time consuming tradition whose execution has been found to bring the opposite of joy.
Christmas cards must hold a special place in both the V&A’s collections and heart, given that the museum’s founder, Henry Cole, inadvertently invented them in 1843.
As a well respected man about town, he received a great many more holiday letters than he had time or inclination to respond to, but neither did he wish to appear rude.
So he enlisted his friend, painter J.C. Horsley, to create a festive illustration with a built-in holiday greeting, leaving just enough space to personalize with a recipient’s name and perhaps, a handwritten line or two.
He then had enough postcard-sized reproductions printed up to send to 1000 of his friends.
Part of the reason the cards in the V&A’s collection are so well preserved is that their recipients prized them enough to keep them in souvenir albums.
Understandably. They’re very appealing little artifacts.
The upper crust could afford such fancy design elements as clever die-cut shapes, pop up elements, and translucent windows that encouraged the recipients to hold them up to actual windows.
Technological advances in the printing industry, and the creation of the cost-effective Penny Post allowed those whose budgets were more modest than Mr. Cole’s to participate too.
Their cards tended to be simpler in execution, though not necessarily concept.
In addition to the views we’ve come to expect — winter, Father Christmas, holly — the Victorians had a thing for jolly anthropomorphized food and some truly shameless puns.
Enjoy these Ghosts of Christmas Past, dear readers. We’re almost inspired to revive the tradition!
Read more about the advent of this tradition, including how it jumped the pond, in Smithsonian Magazine’sHistory of the Christmas Card.
I never use a metal detector and I often walk little more than a mile in 5 hours, yet I can travel 2,000 years back in time through the objects that are revealed by the tide. Prehistoric flint tools, medieval pilgrim badges, Tudor shoes, Georgian wig curlers and Victorian pottery, ordinary objects left behind by the ordinary people who made London what it is today.
As she says in the short film above, her first find has become one of her most common — a clay pipe fragment.
The term mudlark was invented to describe the poverty stricken Victorians who scoured the foreshore for copper, wire, and other items with resale value, as well as things they could clean off and use themselves.
Today’s mudlarks are primarily history buffs and amateur archeologists.
The hobby has become so popular that The Port of London Authority, which controls the Thames waterway along with the Crown Estate, has started to require foreshore permits of all prospective debris hunters.
Permitted mudlarks can claim as souvenirs however many Victorian clay pipes and blue and white pottery shards they dig up, but are legally obliged by the Portable Antiquities Scheme to report items of potentially greater historic and monetary value — i.e. Treasure — to a museum-trained Finds Liason Officer:
Any metallic object, other than a coin, provided that at least 10 per cent by weight of metal is precious metal (that is, gold or silver) and that it is at least 300 years old when found. If the object is of prehistoric date it will be Treasure provided any part of it is precious metal.
Any group of two or more metallic objects of any composition of prehistoric date that come from the same find (see note below).
Two or more coins from the same find provided they are at least 300 years old when found and contain 10 per cent gold or silver (if the coins contain less than 10 per cent of gold or silver there must be at least ten of them). Only the following groups of coins will normally be regarded as coming from the same find: Hoards that have been deliberately hidden; Smaller groups of coins, such as the contents of purses, that may been dropped or lost; Votive or ritual deposits.
Any object, whatever it is made of, that is found in the same place as, or had previously been together with, another object that is Treasure.
How did all this historic refuse come to be in the Thames? Maiklem told Collectors Weeklythat there are many reasons:
Obviously, it’s been used as a rubbish dump. It was a useful place to chuck your household waste. It was essentially a busy highway, so people accidentally dropped things and lost things as they traveled on it. Of course, people also lived right up against it. London was centered on the Thames so houses were all along it, and there was all this stuff coming out of the houses and off the bridges. It was the biggest port in the world in the 18th century, so there was all the shipbuilding and industry going on.
And then of course, there’s the rubbish that was used to build up the foreshore and create barge beds. The riverbed in its natural state is a V shape, so they had to build up the sides next to the river wall to make them flatter so the flat-bottom barges could rest there at low tide. They did that by pouring rubbish and building spoil and kiln waste, anything they could find—industrial waste, domestic waste. When they dug into the ground further up, they’d bring the spoil down and use it to build up the foreshore, and cap it off with a layer of chalk, which was soft and didn’t damage the bottom of the barges.
One of the reasons we’re finding so much in the river now is because there’s so much erosion. While it was a “working river,” these barge beds were patched up and the revetments, or the wooden walls that held them in, were repaired when they broke. But now, they’re being left to fall apart, and these barge beds are eroding as the river is getting busier with river traffic.
There are numerous social media groups where modern mudlarks can proudly share their finds, and seek assistance in identifying strange or fragmented objects.
Maiklem’s London Mudlark Facebook page is an education in and of itself, a reflection of her abiding interest in the historic significance of the items she truffles up.
Witness the pewter buckle plate dating to the 14th or 15th-century that she spotted on the foreshore in late November, turned over to her Finds Liaison Officer and researched with the help of historic pewter craftsman Colin Torode:
Prior to c.1350 pewter belt fittings seem to have been rather rare, although a London Girdlers’ Guild Charter of 1321 which banned the use of pewter belt fittings does show that the metal was certainly in use. In 1344 the Girdlers’ guild again reiterated the ban on what they felt were inferior metals such as pewter, tin and lead. In 1391 however, a statute recognized that these metals had been in use for some time and that their use could continue without restriction
This ornate plate would have had a separate buckle frame attached to it and is probably a cheaper copy of the more upmarket copper alloy or silver versions that were produced at the time.Although the the openwork design is similar to those found in in furniture or church screens, it’s not religious or pilgrim related.
Maiklem also challenges fans to play along from home with “spot the find” videos for such items as a Tudor clothes hook, Georgian cufflink, and a German salt glazed, stoneware bottle’s neck embossed with a human face.
The river also spews up plenty of drowned rats, flushing them out with the sewage after a heavy rain. Other potential hazards include hypodermic needles and broken glass.
In addition to such safety precautions as gloves, sturdy footwear, and remaining mindful of incoming tides, Maiklem advises novice mudlarks to look for straight lines and perfect circles — “the things that nature doesn’t make.”
It takes practice and patience to develop a skilled eye, but don’t get discouraged if your first outings don’t yield the sort of jaw dropping discoveries Maiklem has made — an intact glass Victorian sugar crusher, a 16th-century child’s leather shoe and Roman era pottery shards galore.
Sometimes even plastic comes with a compelling story.
I’m still feeling quite giddy over this bit of plastic. I came to Cornwall this week to write and to beachcomb. I hoped I might find a small piece of Lost Lego, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. Calm weather means less plastic: good for the beach, bad for the Lego looker. Then I found this wedged between two boulders. It’s one of the black octopuses from the Lego spill of 1997 when, 20 miles from Land’s End, a huge wave hit the cargo ship Tokio Express. It tilted 45 degrees and 62 containers slid into the water. One container was filled with nearly 5 million pieces of Lego, much of which was sea themed. Little scuba tanks, flippers, octopuses, cutlasses, life rafts, spear guns, dragons and octopuses like this still wash up on the beaches of Cornwall and further afield.
Stay abreast of Lara Maiklem’s mudlarking finds here.
Try your hand at mudlarking the Thames in person, during a guided tour with the Thames Explorer Trust.
Rare indeed is the ancient-history buff who has never dreamed of walking the roads of the Roman Empire. But unlike many longings stoked by interest in the distant past, that one can actually be fulfilled. As explained in the video above from Youtube channel Intrigued Mind, a fair few Roman roads remain in existence today, albeit only in sections, and mostly ruined ones at that. “Like other incredible monuments that still stand, as if to prove the power of the Roman Empire, there are a surprising number of Roman roads still in use today,” some converted into modern highways, but “many still paved with their original cobblestones.”
Of all such roads, none has more importance than the Via Appia, or Appian Way, whose construction began back in 312 BC. “The first long road outside of the greater city of Rome that wasn’t Etruscan,” it “allowed Romans to make their first major conquest” and begin their mighty empire’s “conquest of the world.” Without understanding the storied Via Appia, none of us can truly understand Roman history. But to grasp the context of the Roman Empire, we can hardly ignore the even older roads like the Via Domitia, which was “the road Hannibal used to invade Italy, 100 years before the Romans claimed it” — not to mention an important setting in the Greek myth of Heracles.
You can still cross one of the Via Domitia’s bridges, the Pont Julien in the south of France. In that same country stand the more-or-less intact Pont Flavian, originally built along the Via Julia Augusta, and the Pont du Gard, the most famous and elegant Roman aqueduct of them all. Nor should enthusiasts of Roman infrastructure miss the Alcantara Bridge in Spain, the Manfred Bridge in Germany, or the ruins of Trajan’s Bridge — made into ruins deliberately, by Trajan’s successor Hadrian — in Romania. The most serious among them will also want to go as far as the Middle East and travel the Via Maris, which connected Egypt to Syria, and the remains of the bridge across Caesar’s Dam in Iran.
Iran belonged, of course, not to the Roman Empire but the Persian one. But “legend has it that the Persian emperor captured the Roman emperor and forced him to use his army to build the dam and the beautiful bridge to cross it.” All was fair, it seems, in the expansion and conflict of ancient empires, and the ruins scattered across their vast former territories testify to that. Though much less technologically advanced than, say, modern freeway systems, the Roman roads that survive have proven surprisingly robust, a phenomenon examined in the video just above by history Youtuber Told in Stone — a Chicagoan, incidentally, who acknowledges that the Via Appia has never had to take a Windy City winter.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Among the ranks of Open Culture readers, there are no doubt more than a few art-history majors. Perhaps you’ve studied the subject yourself, at one time or another — and perhaps you find that by now, you remember only certain scattered artists, works, and movements. What you need is a grand narrative, a broad story of art itself, and that’s just what you’ll find in the video above from Youtube channel Behind the Masterpiece. True to its title, “A Brief History of Art Movements” briefly describes, and provides a host of visual examples to illustrate, 22 phases in the development of art in just 23 minutes.
The journey begins in prehistory, with cave paintings from 40,000 years ago apparently created “as a way to share information.” Then comes the art of antiquity, when increasingly literate societies “started creating the earliest naturalistic images of human beings,” not least to enforce “religious and political ideologies.” The religiosity intensified in the Middle Ages, when artists “depicted clear, iconic images of religious figures” — as well as their oddly aged-looking babies — “and decorated them with extensive use of gold and jewels as a way to attract more people to the church.”
When many us think of art history — whether we studied it or not — our minds go straight to the subsequent period, the Renaissance, during which “artists started to appreciate cultural subjects like art, music, and theater” as well. They created “portrait paintings, anatomically correct sculptures, and symmetrical architecture,” and the invention of the printing press greatly expanded the pool of potential appreciators. Then, in the Baroque movement, enormously skilled artists like Bernini and Caravaggio “emphasized extravagance and emotion,” and other forms followed suit with more intense embellishments of their own.
From eighteenth-century France emerged the “playful and utopian” Rococo period, which was followed by the backward-looking “interest in renewed simplicity” that characterized Neoclassicism, which was followed by Romanticism, a movement whose artists “looked within and found inspiration in their own imaginations, and the nature around them.” It was the leveling French Revolution that brought about the conditions for the rise of Realism, with its focus on “depicting real people in everyday life,” the kind of subjects to that point overlooked in major works of art.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the development of art hit the gas, bringing on the imperfect vitality of Impressionism, the daring subjectivity of Post-Impressionism, the extreme subjectivity of Expressionism, and the sinuous luxury of Art Nouveau. Technology had always been a factor in how art changes, but in the twentieth century — as Cubism gave way to Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Bauhaus — it came to the fore. This brings us up to living memory: movements like Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and the inclination of today’s artists to deal in “ideas rather than aesthetics,” all on display in most any museum you care to visit. Or at least they are in the museums of the West, there being, after all, a whole world of other art histories out there to understand besides.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
For a medieval knight, physical combat in a full suit of armor could hardly have been a simple matter — but then, nor could the task of putting it on in the first place. You can see the latter depicted in the video above from Norwegian history buff Ola Onsrud. He describes the armor as a “detailed reconstruction based on the effigy of the Black Prince (1330–1376) in the Canterbury Cathedral, other relevant effigies, paintings in fourteenth-century manuscripts and late fourteenth-century armor displayed in The Royal Armories in Leeds.” If you’ve so much as glanced at such imagery, Onsrud’s armor should strike you as looking quite like the real deal.
But this is functional clothing, after all, and as such must be put to the test. Onsrud does so in the video just below, a demonstration of how the wearer of such armor would actually do hand-to-hand combat. “To make comments, the visor of my helmet is open through most of the video,” he notes.
“This will of course make my face an interesting target for my adversary.” In a real medieval battle, of course, the helmet would be closed, and thus the combatants wouldn’t simply aim for the face. As Onsrud explains, the idea is to use one’s sword “against the weak spots of the armor. After finding a weak spot, I can put all my body weight behind it and drive it in.”
Medieval suits of armor turn out not to be as impenetrable as they look. Onsrud runs down a few of their major weak points, including the insides of the gloves, the armpits, and — most wince-inducingly of all — the groin. The defense capability of armor also varied depending upon the weapons used; even the best-suited-up had reason to fear an enemy with a poleaxe. “But the absolute best way to take down an armored knight is by using a lance from a horse,” especially a horse “galloping up to 40 kilometers an hour” whose combined weight with its rider could reach 700 kilograms. Surely even the most committed reenactor won’t do that on Youtube.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Most casual viewers of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings must acknowledge his artistic skill, and many must also wonder whether he was completely out of his mind. But insanity, however vividly suggested by his imagery, isn’t an especially compelling explanation for that imagery. Bosch painted in a particular place and time — the Netherlands of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, to be specific — but he also painted within a dominant worldview.“He grew up in a time of deep religious anxiety,” says Youtuber Hochelaga in the video essay above. “Ideas about sin, death, and the devil were becoming more sophisticated,” and “there was a genuine fear that demonic forces lived amongst the population.”
Hence the analyses like that of Great Art Explained, which frames Bosch’s best-known painting The Garden of Earthly Delights as an expression of “hardcore Christianity.” But something about the triptych’s sheer elaborateness and grotesquerie demands further inquiry. Hochelaga explores the possibility that Bosch worked in a condition of not just fearful piety, but psychological affliction.
“There is a disease called St. Anthony’s fire,” he says, contracted “by eating a poisonous black fungus called ergots that grow on rye crops. Symptoms include sores, convulsions, and a fierce burning sensation in limbs and extremities,” as well as “frightening and overpowering hallucinations that can last for hours at a time.”
This psychoactive power is now “believed to be behind the many Dancing Plagues recorded throughout the Middle Ages.” This explanation came together when, “in the mid-twentieth century, it was discovered that when ergots are baked in an oven, they transform into a form of lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD.” Did Bosch himself receive the bizarre visions he painted from inadvertently consuming that now well-known hallucinogenic substance? The many paintings he made of St. Anthony “may have been a form of devotional prayer, done so in the hopes that the saint would rid him of his debilitating illness.” Look at The Garden of Earthly Delights even today, and you’ll feel that if you saw these murderous bird-human hybrids around you, you’d try whatever you could to get rid of them, too.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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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