The History of Birth Control: From Alligator Dung to The Pill

in Gender, Health, History, Politics, Religion | April 25th, 2022

The his­to­ry of birth con­trol is almost as old as the his­to­ry of the wheel.

Pes­saries dat­ing to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt pro­vide the launch­ing pad for doc­u­men­tar­i­an Lind­say Hol­i­day’s overview of birth con­trol through­out the ages and around the world.

Holiday’s His­to­ry Tea Time series fre­quent­ly delves into women’s his­to­ry, and her pledge to donate a por­tion of the above video’s ad rev­enue to Pathfind­er Inter­na­tional serves as reminder that there are parts of the world where women still lack access to afford­able, effec­tive, and safe means of con­tra­cep­tion.

One goal of the World Health Organization’s End­ing Pre­ventable Mater­nal Mor­tal­i­ty ini­tia­tive is for 65% of women to be able to make informed and empow­ered deci­sions regard­ing sex­u­al rela­tions, con­tra­cep­tive use, and their repro­duc­tive health by 2025.

As Hol­i­day points out, expense, social stig­ma, and reli­gious edicts have impact­ed ease of access to birth con­trol for cen­turies.

The fur­ther back you go, you can be cer­tain that some meth­ods advo­cat­ed by mid­wives and med­i­cine women have been lost to his­to­ry, owing to unrecord­ed oral tra­di­tion and the sen­si­tive nature of the infor­ma­tion.

Hol­i­day still man­ages to truf­fle up a fas­ci­nat­ing array of prac­tices and prod­ucts that were thought — often erro­neous­ly — to ward off unwant­ed preg­nan­cy.

Some that worked and con­tin­ue to work to vary­ing degrees, include bar­ri­er meth­ods, con­doms, and more recent­ly the IUD and The Pill.

Def­i­nite­ly NOT rec­om­mend­ed: with­draw­al, hold­ing your breath dur­ing inter­course, a post-coital sneez­ing reg­i­men, douch­ing with Lysol or Coca-Cola, tox­ic cock­tails of lead, mer­cury or cop­per salt, any­thing involv­ing alli­ga­tor dung, and slug­ging back water that’s been used to wash a corpse.

As for sil­phi­um, an herb that like­ly did have some sort of sper­mi­ci­dal prop­er­ties, we’ll nev­er know for sure. By 1 CE, demand out­stripped sup­ply of this rem­e­dy, even­tu­al­ly wip­ing it off the face of the earth despite increas­ing­ly astro­nom­i­cal prices. Fun fact: sil­phi­um was also used to treat sore throat, snakebite, scor­pi­on stings, mange, gout, quin­sy, epilep­sy, and anal warts

The his­to­ry of birth con­trol can be con­sid­ered a semi-secret part of the his­to­ry of pros­ti­tu­tion, fem­i­nism, the mil­i­tary, obscen­i­ty laws, sex edu­ca­tion and atti­tudes toward pub­lic health.

From Mar­garet Sanger and the 60,000 women exe­cut­ed as witch­es in the 16th and 17th cen­turies, to econ­o­mist Thomas Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Prin­ci­ple of Pop­u­la­tion and leg­endary adven­tur­er Gia­co­mo Casano­va’s satin rib­bon-trimmed jim­my hat, this episode of His­to­ry Tea Time with Lind­say Hol­i­day touch­es on it all.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Birth Con­trol Hand­book: The Under­ground Stu­dent Pub­li­ca­tion That Let Women Take Con­trol of Their Bod­ies (1968)

I’m Just a Pill: A School­house Rock Clas­sic Gets Reimag­ined to Defend Repro­duc­tive Rights in 2017

The Sto­ry Of Men­stru­a­tion: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

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Explore a Big Archive of Vintage Early Comics: 1700–1929

in Archives, Art, Comics/Cartoons, History | April 22nd, 2022

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of graph­ic nov­els (and more than a few extreme­ly lucra­tive super­hero movie fran­chis­es) have con­ferred respectabil­i­ty on comics.

Hand­some reis­sues of such stun­ning ear­ly works as Win­sor McKay’s Lit­tle Nemo in Slum­ber­land, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and Frank King’s Walt and Skeez­ix sug­gest that read­ers’ appetite for vin­tage comics extends deep­er and fur­ther back than mere nos­tal­gia for the Sun­day fun­nies of their youth.

Artist Andy Bleck’s Andy’s Ear­ly Comics Archive is an excel­lent resource for those seek­ing to dis­cov­er ear­ly exam­ples of the form that have yet to be reis­sued in a col­lect­ed edi­tion. (Fair warn­ing: reflect­ing the atti­tudes of the time, the col­lec­tion does inevitably con­tains some racist imagery. Such imagery won’t be on dis­play in this post.)

Bleck, the cre­ator of Konky Kru, a beau­ti­ful­ly sim­ple, word­less series, as well as sev­er­al self-pub­lished mini comics, takes a historian’s inter­est in his sub­ject, begin­ning with the William Hog­a­rth engrav­ings A Harlot’s Progress from 1730:

The famous ‘pro­gres­sions’ by Hog­a­rth were not actu­al­ly comics. The images don’t lead into and don’t inter­act with each oth­er. Each shows a dis­tinct, sep­a­rate stage of a longer sto­ry. How­ev­er, because of their great pop­u­lar­i­ty, they estab­lished the very notion of telling enter­tain­ing sto­ries with a series of pic­tures and so became a high­ly influ­en­tial step­ping stone for future devel­op­ments.

He also cites the influ­ence of British polit­i­cal car­toons, Chi­nese wood­cuts, illus­trat­ed fairy tales and nurs­ery rhymes, and Hein­rich Hoff­man­n’s Struwwelpeter, a book that ter­ri­fied chil­dren into behav­ing by depict­ing the mon­strous con­se­quences befalling those who failed to do so.

Iron­i­cal­ly, Franz Joseph Goez’s Lenar­do und Blan­dine, an actu­al graph­ic nov­el­ette from 1783, “prob­a­bly had lit­tle influ­ence:”

 It was too ahead of its time as far as the com­ic struc­ture is con­cerned. In con­tent, it was delight­ful­ly very much of its time, full of out­ra­geous melo­dra­ma.

Things con­tin­ued to evolve in the sec­ond half of the 19th-cen­tu­ry, with pic­ture broad­sheets for chil­dren, such as the ones star­ring Wil­helm Busch’s wild­ly pop­u­lar Max and Moritz. (See an Eng­lish trans­la­tion here.)

Bleck traces the birth of mod­ern comics, whose sto­ry­telling vocab­u­lary con­tin­ues today, to the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry, with Amer­i­can news­pa­per strips and par­tic­u­lar­ly, the Sun­day fun­nies:

The news­pa­per for­mat was much larg­er and cheap­er, pro­vid­ing a lot more emp­ty space to fill. The audi­ence was less sophis­ti­cat­ed, but (pos­si­bly because of this) more open to a par­tic­u­lar type of exper­i­men­ta­tion, despite the dumb and low­brow humor… these Amer­i­can Sun­day pages became the breed­ing ground for some­thing new. Weird­er, rougher, slap­dashier. Also eas­i­er, for chil­dren, but not child­ish. More pop­u­lar. More … some­thingi­er.

Maybe it was that new type of human being, the urban immi­grant, who was most pre­pared and eager to pay for all this new visu­al goings on.

Andy’s Ear­ly Comics Archive can be searched chrono­log­i­cal­ly, or alpha­bet­i­cal­ly by artist’s name. Enter here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Read The Very First Com­ic Book: The Adven­tures of Oba­di­ah Old­buck (1837)

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

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The Sistine Chapel: A $22,000 Art-Book Collection Features Remarkable High-Resolution Views of the Murals of Michelangelo, Botticelli & Other Renaissance Masters

in Art, Books, History, Religion | April 22nd, 2022

Michelan­ge­lo did­n’t want to paint the ceil­ing of the Sis­tine Chapel. Hav­ing con­sid­ered him­self more of a sculp­tor than a painter — and, giv­en his skill with stone, not with­out cause — he felt that tak­ing on such an ambi­tious project could bring him to ruin. But one does not sim­ply turn down a job offer from the Vat­i­can, and espe­cial­ly not when one is among the most respect­ed artists in six­teenth-cen­tu­ry Italy. In the event, Michelan­ge­lo proved equal to the task, or rather, much more than equal: he com­plet­ed his ceil­ing fres­coes in 1512 for Pope Julius II, and 23 years lat­er was com­mis­sioned again by Pope Paul III to paint the Last Judg­ment over the altar.

Long before Michelan­ge­lo touched a brush to the Sis­tine Chapel’s ceil­ing, a team of painters includ­ing San­dro Bot­ti­cel­li, Pietro Perug­i­no, and Pin­turic­chio had already adorned the build­ing’s inte­ri­or with fres­coes depict­ing the lives of Moses and Jesus Christ.

Tak­en togeth­er, the Sis­tine Chapel has long been regard­ed as one of the great­est achieve­ments in West­ern art, if not the great­est of them all. Hence the six mil­lion tourists who vis­it­ed it each year before COVID-19; hence, more recent­ly, the painstak­ing care that has gone into the pro­duc­tion of The Sis­tine Chapel, a three-vol­ume at-book set that brings the build­ing’s Bib­li­cal visions as close as any earth­ly read­er cold hope to see them.


The fruit of a half-decade-long col­lab­o­ra­tion between the Vat­i­can and two pub­lish­ers, Call­away Arts & Enter­tain­ment and Scrip­ta Maneant, The Sis­tine Chapel demand­ed 65 nights of con­sec­u­tive work from its pho­tog­ra­phers, who shot 270,000 high-res­o­lu­tion images. Cap­tur­ing the mas­ter­works on the walls and ceil­ing down to the tex­tures of their paint and brush­strokes neces­si­tat­ed climb­ing up on scaf­fold­ing, just as Michelan­ge­lo him­self famous­ly did to make his con­tri­bu­tions in the first place. Lim­it­ed by the Vat­i­can to a print run of 1,999 copies, the set is now avail­able for pur­chase at Abe­Books, though it will cost you $22,000. In a sense that’s a small price to pay, for as Goethe put it, “with­out hav­ing seen the Sis­tine Chapel one can form no appre­cia­ble idea of what one man is capa­ble of achiev­ing.” Find The Sis­tine Chapel book col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a 3D Vir­tu­al Tour of the Sis­tine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca and Oth­er Art-Adorned Vat­i­can Spaces

Michelangelo’s David: The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry Behind the Renais­sance Mar­ble Cre­ation

New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculp­tures

Michelangelo’s Hand­writ­ten 16th-Cen­tu­ry Gro­cery List

The Sis­tine Chapel of the Ancients: Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er 8 Miles of Art Paint­ed on Rock Walls in the Ama­zon

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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100-Year-Old Music Recordings Can Now Be Heard for the First Time, Thanks to New Digital Technology

in History, Music, Technology | April 21st, 2022

If you were lis­ten­ing to record­ed music around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, you lis­tened to it on cylin­ders. Not that any­one alive today was lis­ten­ing to record­ed music back then, and much of it has since been lost. Invent­ed by Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell (bet­ter known for his work on an even more pop­u­lar device known as the tele­phone), the record­ing cylin­der marked a con­sid­er­able improve­ment on Thomas Edis­on’s ear­li­er tin­foil phono­graph. Nev­er hes­i­tant to cap­i­tal­ize on an inno­va­tion — no mat­ter who did the inno­vat­ing — Edi­son then began mar­ket­ing cylin­ders of his own, soon turn­ing his own name into the for­mat’s most pop­u­lar and rec­og­niz­able brand.

“Edi­son set up coin-oper­at­ed phono­graph machines that would play pre-record­ed wax cylin­ders in train sta­tions, hotel lob­bies, and oth­er pub­lic places through­out the Unit­ed States,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Sarah Durn. They also became the medi­um choice for hob­by­ists. “One of the most famous is Lionel Maple­son,” says Jen­nifer Vanasco in an NPR sto­ry from ear­li­er this month.

“He record­ed his fam­i­ly,” but “he was also the librar­i­an for the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera. And in the ear­ly 1900s, he record­ed dozens of rehearsals and per­for­mances. Lis­ten­ing to his work is the only way you can hear pre-World War I opera singers with a full orches­tra”: Ger­man sopra­no Frie­da Hempel, singing “Evvi­va la Fran­cia!” above.

The “Maple­son Cylin­ders” con­sti­tute just part of the New York Pub­lic Library’s col­lec­tion of about 2,700 record­ings in that for­mat. “Only a small por­tion of those cylin­ders, around 175, have ever been dig­i­tized,” writes Durn. “The vast major­i­ty of the cylin­ders have nev­er even been played in the gen­er­a­tions since the library acquired them.” Most have become too frag­ile to with­stand the nee­dles of tra­di­tion­al play­ers. Enter End­point Audio Labs’ $50,000 Cylin­der and Dictabelt Machine, which uses a com­bi­na­tion of nee­dle and laser to read and dig­i­tize even already-dam­aged cylin­ders with­out harm. Only sev­en of End­point’s machines exist in the world, one of them a recent acqui­si­tion of the NYPL’s, which will now be able to play many of its cylin­ders for the first time in more than a cen­tu­ry.

Some of these cylin­ders are unla­beled, their con­tents unknown. Cura­tor Jes­si­ca Wood, as Velas­co says, is hop­ing to “hear a birth­day par­ty or some­thing that tells us more about the social his­to­ry at the time, even some­one shout­ing their name and explain­ing they’re test­ing the machine, which is a pret­ty com­mon thing to hear on these record­ings.” She knows that the NYPL’s col­lec­tion has “about eight cylin­ders from Por­tu­gal, which may be some of the old­est record­ings ever made in the coun­try,” as well as “five Argen­tin­ian cylin­ders that have pre­served the sound of cen­tu­ry-old tan­go music.” In the event, from the first cylin­der she puts on for NPR’s micro­phone issue famil­iar words: “Hel­lo, my baby. Hel­lo, my hon­ey. Hel­lo, my rag­time gal.” This lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence per­haps felt like some­thing less than time trav­el. But then, were you real­ly to go back to 1899, what song would you be more like­ly to hear?

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Cour­tesy of the UCSB Cylin­der Audio Archive

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

Hear Singers from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera Record Their Voic­es on Tra­di­tion­al Wax Cylin­ders

A Beer Bot­tle Gets Turned Into a 19th Cen­tu­ry Edi­son Cylin­der and Plays Fine Music

400,000+ Sound Record­ings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain

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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What Great Archaeological Sites Used To Actually Look Like: Machu Picchu, the Colossus of Rhodes, Hadrian’s Wall & More in All Their Glory

in History | April 20th, 2022

With nation­al bor­der restric­tions now loos­en­ing up, many of us are reviv­ing our years-dor­mant world trav­el plans. For some, the pan­dem­ic-induced sus­pen­sion of easy access to oth­er coun­tries has even inspired jour­neys they might not oth­er­wise have tak­en. Stuck at home, they real­ized that they’d nev­er seen the won­ders of the ancient world — or at any rate, what remains of the won­ders of the ancient world. Ruin tourism has a long and pres­ti­gious his­to­ry, of course, but it also has the unde­sir­able side effect of sub­con­scious­ly con­vinc­ing us that our ancient fore­bears lived amid a more sham­bol­ic built envi­ron­ment than they real­ly did. To see these ruins as they were before their ruina­tion demands a strong imag­i­na­tion.

Alter­na­tive­ly, you can watch the video above, which presents artis­tic recon­struc­tions of such still-fre­quent­ed sites as Pom­peii, Machu Pic­chu, Chichen Itza, the Parthenon, and the Great Pyra­mid of Giza. You can still see some these struc­tures for your­self, of course, albeit only now that the rav­ages of time — as well as those of var­i­ous plun­der­ers, scav­engers, and insti­tu­tions — have tak­en their ter­ri­ble toll.

(The food hall of Nero’s palace still stands, but the water-pow­ered rota­tion sys­tem that made it his­to­ry’s first revolv­ing restau­rant has long since gone out of order.) Oth­ers of them nobody has seen since antiq­ui­ty itself: the Colos­sus of Rhodes once stood a hun­dred feet tall over that Greek island, but it only did so for 54 years until its top­pling by an Earth­quake in 226 BC.

Yet over the two-and-a-quar­ter mil­len­nia since, the Colos­sus has come to take on much greater pro­por­tions in our minds. “The famous imagery of it strad­dling the har­bor,” says the video, only “came about cen­turies lat­er, and was tout­ed by his­to­ri­ans in the Mid­dle Ages who had nev­er seen the mon­u­ment. The har­bor itself is almost the same width as an Amer­i­can foot­ball field, so to be pro­por­tion­al­ly accu­rate, the stat­ue would have to stand a stu­pen­dous 1,640 feet tall. This was firm­ly impos­si­ble at the time.” Even today, nowhere on Earth boasts a stat­ue that’s so much as half that size. And indeed, this may con­sti­tute the endur­ing appeal of ruins: how­ev­er glo­ri­ous they would have been when whole, their worn, dis­col­ored frag­ments fire our imag­i­na­tions to much greater heights.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Ancient Greece Real­ly Looked Like: See Recon­struc­tions of the Tem­ple of Hadri­an, Curetes Street & the Foun­tain of Tra­jan

Watch Ancient Ruins Get Restored to their Glo­ri­ous Orig­i­nal State with Ani­mat­ed GIFs: The Tem­ple of Jupiter, Lux­or Tem­ple & More

Pom­peii Rebuilt: A Tour of the Ancient City Before It Was Entombed by Mount Vesu­vius

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

Roman Stat­ues Weren’t White; They Were Once Paint­ed in Vivid, Bright Col­ors

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

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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Behold 3D Recreations of Pompeii’s Lavish Homes–As They Existed Before the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius

in Animation, Archaeology, Architecture, History | April 19th, 2022

“I pray that to their share of noble for­tunes [Zeus] send no Neme­sis of jeal­ous will, but in pros­per­i­ty and free from ills, exalt them and their city.” Pin­dar, Olympian Ode 8

Why are humans awestruck by nat­ur­al dis­as­ter? Or — more to the point — why are we dumb­found­ed when dis­as­ters destroy cities? We should hard­ly be sur­prised at this point when nature does what it invari­ably does: tec­ton­ic plates shift, vol­ca­noes erupt, hur­ri­canes and typhoons sweep the coasts…. These things have always hap­pened on Earth, with or with­out our help, and for many mil­lions of years before any­thing like us showed up.

Like the myth­i­cal Nar­cis­sus, we can only see our­selves and assume every­thing that hap­pens must be for us. After the Great Lis­bon Earth­quake in Por­tu­gal in 1755, “Lis­bon’s devout Catholic pop­u­la­tion saw the ruined city as divine pun­ish­ment,” writes Lau­ra Trethewey.

“The Protes­tant coun­tries of Europe also saw the destruc­tion as pun­ish­ment, but for back­ward Catholic behav­ior.” Mean­while, philoso­phers like Voltaire, who wrote Can­dide to sat­i­rize respons­es to the quake, saw the cat­a­stro­phe as more evi­dence that a cre­ator, if such a being had ever cared, cared no more.

In Greek and Roman mythol­o­gy, the gods nev­er stop med­dling, pun­ish­ing, reward­ing, etc. Nar­cis­sus is tempt­ed to gaze at him­self by Neme­sis, the god­dess who meets hubris with swift ret­ri­bu­tion. While gen­er­al­ly invoked as a lev­el­er of indi­vid­u­als who over­step, she also lev­els cities, as fifth cen­tu­ry BC Greek poet Pin­dar sug­gests when he begs Zeus to spare the island city of Aegi­na from her wrath. Per­haps, then, it was Neme­sis, winged vengeance her­self, that the cit­i­zens of Pom­peii believed bore down upon them, as molten lava, smoke, and ash.

From its ear­li­est sta­tus as a Roman-allied city (then Roman colony), Pom­peii grew into a very wealthy area, its sur­round­ing lands rich with vil­las and farms, its city cen­ter anchored by its Amphithe­ater, Odeon, Forum Baths and tem­ples, its run­ning water arriv­ing from the Seri­no Aque­duct. Maybe they had it too good? Maybe their extrav­a­gant good for­tune caused too much jeal­ous­ly in the neigh­bors? Maybe the gods demand­ed bal­ance. It’s very human to think so — to ascribe divine will, in the lack of expla­na­tion, for why some­thing so filled with teem­ing life should be destroyed for no rea­son at all.

It must have been the gods, who looked down on Pom­pei­i’s wealth and grew jeal­ous them­selves. In these 3D ani­mat­ed videos, see why ancient Pom­pei­ians would have been proud of their city, recre­at­ed here in part by Swe­den’s Lund Uni­ver­si­ty and Sto­ried Past Pro­duc­tions. “While in Pom­peii few could reach the elite,” notes the lat­ter in their descrip­tion of the video above, “many tried to recre­ate ‘the good life’ in their own ways.… From grand urban vil­las, to small pri­vate homes, to small­er apart­ments.” In these walk­throughs, you can “see all the dif­fer­ent things ‘home’ could mean in ancient Pom­peii.” You might also, if you aren’t care­ful, find your­self get­ting a lit­tle envi­ous of these doomed ancient urban­ites.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pom­peii Rebuilt: A Tour of the Ancient City Before It Was Entombed by Mount Vesu­vius

The Lit­tle-Known Bomb­ing of Pom­peii Dur­ing World War II

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

A Drone’s Eye View of the Ruins of Pom­peii

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

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How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II

in Art, History | April 15th, 2022

Pho­to­graph by Pierre Jahan/Archives des museés nationaux

Twice, we’ve brought you posts explain­ing how the Mona Lisa – the most famous paint­ing in the world – went from near obscu­ri­ty to glob­al noto­ri­ety almost overnight, after an employ­ee of the Lou­vre pur­loined and tried to hide it in 1911. Accu­sa­tions flew – includ­ing very pub­lic accu­sa­tions against Pablo Picas­so; sala­cious rumors cir­cu­lat­ed; the enig­mat­ic smile of Lisa del Gio­con­da — the Flo­ren­tine silk merchant’s wife depict­ed in the paint­ing – appeared in black and white pho­tographs in news­pa­pers around the globe. When she returned to the muse­um, vis­i­tors couldn’t, and still can­not, wait to see her in per­son. As great as that sto­ry is, what hap­pened a few decades lat­er under the Nazi-con­trolled Vichy gov­ern­ment makes for an even bet­ter tale.

By the 1930s, the Mona Lisa was deemed the most impor­tant work of art in France’s most impor­tant muse­um. With due respect to the Mon­u­ments Men (and unsung Mon­u­ments Women), before the Allies arrived to res­cue many of Europe’s price­less works of art, French civ­il ser­vants, stu­dents, and work­men did it them­selves, sav­ing most of the Lou­vre’s entire col­lec­tion. The hero of the sto­ry, Jacques Jau­jard, direc­tor of France’s Nation­al Muse­ums, has gone down in his­to­ry as “the man who saved the Lou­vre” — also the title of an award-win­ning French doc­u­men­tary (see trail­er below). Men­tal Floss pro­vides con­text for Jau­jard’s hero­ism:

After Ger­many annexed Aus­tria in March of 1938, Jau­jard… lost what­ev­er small hope he had that war might be avoid­ed. He knew Britain’s pol­i­cy of appease­ment was­n’t going to keep the Nazi wolf from the door, and an inva­sion of France was sure to bring destruc­tion of cul­tur­al trea­sures via bomb­ings, loot­ing, and whole­sale theft. So, togeth­er with the Lou­vre’s cura­tor of paint­ings René Huyghe, Jau­jard craft­ed a secret plan to evac­u­ate almost all of the Lou­vre’s art, which includ­ed 3600 paint­ings alone.

On the day Ger­many and the Sovi­et Union signed the Nonag­gres­sion Pact, August 25, 1939, Jau­jard closed the Lou­vre for “repairs” for three days while staff, “stu­dents from the École du Lou­vre, and work­ers form the Grands Mag­a­zines du Lou­vre depart­ment store took paint­ings out of their frames… and moved stat­ues and oth­er objects from their dis­plays with wood­en crates.”

The stat­ues includ­ed the three ton Winged Nike of Samoth­race (see a pho­to of its move here), the Egypt­ian Old King­dom Seat­ed Scribe, and the Venus de Milo. All of these, like the oth­er works of art, would be moved to chateaus in the coun­try­side for safe keep­ing. On August 28, “hun­dreds of trucks orga­nized into con­voys car­ried 1000 crates of ancient and 268 crates of paint­ings and more” into the Loire Val­ley.

Includ­ed in that haul of trea­sures was the Mona Lisa, placed in a cus­tom case, cush­ioned with vel­vet. Where oth­er works received labels of yel­low, green, and red dots accord­ing to their lev­el of impor­tance, the Mona Lisa was marked with three red dots — the only work to receive such high pri­or­i­ty. It was trans­port­ed by ambu­lance, gen­tly strapped to a stretch­er. After leav­ing the muse­um, the paint­ing would be moved five times, “includ­ing to Loire Val­ley cas­tles and a qui­et abbey.” The Nazis would loot much of what was left in the Lou­vre, and force it to re-open in 1940 with most of its gal­leries stark­ly emp­ty. But the Mona Lisa — at the top of Hitler’s list of art­works to expro­pri­ate — remained safe, as did many thou­sands more art­works Jau­jard believed were the “her­itage of all human­i­ty,” as Inge Laino, Paris Muse Direc­tor, says in the France 24 seg­ment above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Paint­ing?: It’s Not What You Think

The 16,000 Art­works the Nazis Cen­sored and Labeled “Degen­er­ate Art”: The Com­plete His­toric Inven­to­ry Is Now Online

The Louvre’s Entire Col­lec­tion Goes Online: View and Down­load 480,00 Works of Art

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

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Make Your Own Medieval Memes with a New Tool from the Dutch National Library

in Art, History, Web/Tech | April 14th, 2022

As much joy as inter­net memes have giv­en you over the years, you may have strug­gled to explain them to those unfa­mil­iar with the con­cept. But if you’ve found it a tall order to artic­u­late the pow­er of found images crude­ly over­laid with text to, say, your par­ents, imag­ine attempt­ing to do the same to an ances­tor from the four­teenth cen­tu­ry. Intro­duc­ing memes to a medieval per­son, the best strat­e­gy would pre­sum­ably be to begin not with sar­don­ic Willy Won­ka, the guy dis­tract­ed by anoth­er girl, or The Most Inter­est­ing Man in the World, but memes with famil­iar medieval imagery. Thanks to KB, the nation­al library of the Nether­lands, you can now make some of you own with ease.

“On www.medievalmemes.org vis­i­tors can use images tak­en from the Dutch nation­al library’s medieval col­lec­tion and turn them into memes,” says Medievalists.net. “When using the meme gen­er­a­tor, peo­ple active­ly cre­ate new con­texts for these his­toric images by adding cur­rent cap­tions. The avail­able images are accom­pa­nied by explana­to­ry videos, pro­vid­ing view­ers with back­ground infor­ma­tion and show­ing them that, much like today, peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages used images to com­ment on their sur­round­ings and cur­rent affairs.” You might repur­pose these live­ly pieces of medieval art for such twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry top­ics as club­bing, online shop­ping, or the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

At the top of this post appears an image from 1327, orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed for a book of mir­a­cles King Charles IV ordered for his queen. As KB explains, it offers “a warn­ing of what can hap­pen if you don’t learn your prayers prop­er­ly.” Below that is “a sort of Medi­ae­val car­toon” from 1183 about the tech­niques involved in prop­er­ly slaugh­ter­ing a pig. And just above, we see what hap­pened when “the Ken­ite Jael lured the leader of the army, Sis­era, into her tent. Sis­era had been vio­lent­ly oppress­ing the Ken­ites for 20 years. While he slept, she whacked a tent peg straight through his head.” Though cre­at­ed for a pic­ture Bible 592 years ago, this pic­ture sure­ly has poten­tial for trans­po­si­tion into com­men­tary on the very dif­fer­ent per­ils of life in the twen­ty-twen­ties. But when you deploy it as a meme, you can do so in the knowl­edge that even your medieval fore­bears would have known that feel.

via Medievalist.net

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Butt Trum­pets & Oth­er Bizarre Images Appeared in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

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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