Behold a 21st-Century Medieval Castle Being Built with Only Tools & Materials from the Middle Ages

in Architecture, Design, History, Video - Arts & Culture | October 7th, 2022

Con­struc­tion sites are hives of spe­cial­ized activ­i­ty, but there’s no par­tic­u­lar train­ing need­ed to fer­ry 500 lbs of stone sev­er­al sto­ries to the masons wait­ing above. All you need is the sta­mi­na for a few steep flights and a medieval tread­wheel crane or “squir­rel cage.”

The tech­nol­o­gy, which uses sim­ple geom­e­try and human exer­tion to hoist heavy loads, dates to ancient Roman times.

Retired in the Vic­to­ri­an era, it has been res­ur­rect­ed and is being put to good use on the site of a for­mer sand­stone quar­ry two hours south of Paris, where the cas­tle of an imag­i­nary, low rank­ing 13th-cen­tu­ry noble­man began tak­ing shape in 1997.

There’s no typo in that time­line.

Château de Guéde­lon is an immer­sive edu­ca­tion­al project, an open air exper­i­men­tal arche­ol­o­gy lab, and a high­ly unusu­al work­ing con­struc­tion site.

With a project time­line of 35 years, some 40 quar­rypeo­ple, stone­ma­sons, wood­cut­ters, car­pen­ters, tilers, black­smiths, rope mak­ers and carters can expect anoth­er ten years on the job.

That’s longer than a medieval con­struc­tion crew would have tak­en, but unlike their 21st-cen­tu­ry coun­ter­parts, they did­n’t have to take fre­quent breaks to explain their labors to the vis­it­ing pub­lic.

A team of arche­ol­o­gists, art his­to­ri­ans and castel­lol­o­gists strive for authen­tic­i­ty, eschew­ing elec­tric­i­ty and any vehi­cle that does­n’t have hooves.

Research mate­ri­als include illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, stained glass win­dows, finan­cial records, and exist­ing cas­tles.

The 1425-year-old Can­ter­bury Cathe­dral has a non-repro­duc­tion tread­mill crane stored in its rafters, as well as a levers and pul­leys activ­i­ty sheet for young vis­i­tors that notes that oper­at­ing a “human tread­mill” was both gru­el­ing and dan­ger­ous:

Philoso­pher John Stu­art Mill wrote that they were “unequalled in the mod­ern annals of legal­ized tor­ture.”

Good call, then, on the part of Guédelon’s lead­er­ship to allow a few anachro­nisms in the name of safe­ty.

Guédelon’s tread­mill cranes, includ­ing a dou­ble drum mod­el that piv­ots 360º to deposit loads of up to 1000 lbs wher­ev­er the stone­ma­sons have need of them, have been out­fit­ted with brakes. The walk­ers inside the wood­en wheels wear hard hats, as are the over­seer and those mon­i­tor­ing the brakes and the cra­dle hold­ing the stones.

The onsite work­er-edu­ca­tors may be garbed in peri­od-appro­pri­ate loose-fit­ting nat­ur­al fibers, but rest assured that their toes are steel-rein­forced.

Château de Guéde­lon guide Sarah Pre­ston explains the rea­son­ing:

Obvi­ous­ly, we’re not try­ing to dis­cov­er how many peo­ple were killed or injured in the 13th-cen­tu­ry.

Learn more about Château de Guéde­lon, includ­ing how you can arrange a vis­it, here.

Explore the his­to­ry of tread­mill cranes here.

And see how the Château de Guéde­lon has housed Ukrain­ian refugees here.

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Medieval City Plan Gen­er­a­tor: A Fun Way to Cre­ate Your Own Imag­i­nary Medieval Cities

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

Behold the Medieval Wound Man: The Poor Soul Who Illus­trat­ed the Injuries a Per­son Might Receive Through War, Acci­dent or Dis­ease

- 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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Why Monet Painted The Same Haystacks 25 Times

in Art, History | October 6th, 2022

In the nine­teen-twen­ties, as George Orwell remem­bers it, “Paris was invad­ed by such a swarm of artists, writ­ers, stu­dents, dilet­tan­ti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has prob­a­bly nev­er seen. In some quar­ters of the town the so-called artists must actu­al­ly have out­num­bered the work­ing pop­u­la­tion.” Along stretch­es of the Seine, “it was almost impos­si­ble to pick one’s way between the sketch­ing-stools.” Legit­i­mate or oth­er­wise, these artists were gen­uine descen­dants of Claude Mon­et, at least in the sense that the lat­ter pio­neered paint­ing en plein air, dis­till­ing art direct­ly from the world all around him.

“When artists had to grind their own pig­ments or buy paints con­tained in frag­ile pig blad­ders,” says Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak in the video essay above, “it was much eas­i­er to work in a stu­dio. The advent of tubes of paint, like these flex­i­ble zinc tubes invent­ed by John Rand in 1841, in which the paint would not dry out, enabled a porta­bil­i­ty that made out­door paint­ing easy and fea­si­ble.” As usu­al in moder­ni­ty, a devel­op­ment in tech­nol­o­gy enabled a devel­op­ment in cul­ture, but to show what kind of pos­si­bil­i­ties had been opened up took an artist of rare vision as well as rare brazen­ness: more specif­i­cal­ly, an artist like Mon­et.

“Obsessed, most of all, with light and col­or, and the ways they reg­is­ter in the human mind,” Mon­et “reject­ed the pop­u­lar con­ven­tions of his time, which pri­or­i­tized line, col­or, and blend­ed brush­strokes that con­cealed the artist’s hand in favor of sev­er­al short, thick appli­ca­tions of sol­id col­or placed side by side, large­ly unblend­ed.” His paint­ings, which we now cred­it with launch­ing the Impres­sion­ist move­ment, show us not so much col­ors as “col­or rela­tion­ships that seem to change and vibrate as your eye scans across the can­vas.” But then, so does real life, whose con­stant­ly chang­ing light ensures that “every few min­utes, we expe­ri­ence a sub­tly dif­fer­ent col­or palette.”

For Puschak, nowhere is Mon­et’s artis­tic enter­prise more clear­ly demon­strat­ed than in the so-called “Haystacks.” The series con­sists of 25 paint­ings depict­ing just what that name sug­gests (and which, belong­ing to Mon­et’s neigh­bor in Giverny, were well placed to catch his eye), each paint­ed at a dif­fer­ent time of day. Each image rep­re­sents Mon­et’s attempt to cap­ture the light col­ors just as he per­ceived them at a par­tic­u­lar moment, straight from nature. Tak­en togeth­er, they con­sti­tute “maybe the defin­i­tive expres­sion of the Impres­sion­ist move­ment” — as well as a reminder that, haystack or water lily, we nev­er tru­ly set eyes on the same thing twice.

You can now pur­chase a copy of the Nerd­writer’s new book, Escape into Mean­ing: Essays on Super­man, Pub­lic Bench­es, and Oth­er Obses­sions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Mon­et to Paint His Final Mas­ter­pieces & Cre­ate “the World’s First Art Instal­la­tion”

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Mon­et in 14 Min­utes

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

1923 Pho­to of Claude Mon­et Col­orized: See the Painter in the Same Col­or as His Paint­ings

1,540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

A Quick Six Minute Jour­ney Through Mod­ern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Paint­ing, “The Lun­cheon on the Grass,” to Jack­son Pol­lock 1950s Drip Paint­ings

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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Artist Makes Astonishing Armor for Cats & Mice

in Art, Design, History, Uncategorized, Video - Arts & Culture | October 5th, 2022

As a child, Jeff De Boer, the son of a sheet met­al fab­ri­ca­tor, was fas­ci­nat­ed by the Euro­pean plate armor col­lec­tion in Calgary’s Glen­bow Muse­um:

There was some­thing mag­i­cal or mys­ti­cal about that emp­ty form, that con­tained some­thing. So what would it con­tain? A hero? Do we all con­tain that in our­selves?

After grad­u­at­ing from high school wear­ing a par­tial suit of armor he con­struct­ed for the occa­sion, De Boer com­plet­ed sev­en full suits, while major­ing in jew­el­ry design at the Alber­ta Col­lege of Art and Design.

A sculp­ture class assign­ment pro­vid­ed him with an excuse to make a suit of armor for a cat. The artist had found his niche.

Using steel, sil­ver, brass, bronze, nick­el, cop­per, leather, fiber, wood, and his del­i­cate jew­el­ry mak­ing tools, DeBoer became the cats’ armor­er, spend­ing any­where from 50 to 200 hours pro­duc­ing each increas­ing­ly intri­cate suit of feline armor.  A noble pur­suit, but one that inad­ver­tent­ly cre­at­ed an “imbal­ance in the uni­verse”:

The only way to fix it was to do the same for the mouse.

“The suit of armor is a trans­for­ma­tion vehi­cle. It’s some­thing that only the hero would wear,” De Boer notes.

Fans of David Petersen’s Mouse Guard series will need no con­vinc­ing, though no real mouse has had the mis­for­tune to find its way inside one of his aston­ish­ing, cus­tom-made cre­ations.

Not even a taxi­dermy spec­i­men, he revealed on the Mak­ing, Our Way pod­cast:

It’s not an alto­geth­er bad idea. The only rea­son I don’t do it is that hol­low suit of armor like you might see in a muse­um, your imag­i­na­tion will make it do a mil­lion things more than if you stick a mouse in it will ever do. I have put armor on cats. I can tell you, it’s noth­ing like what you think it’s going to be. It’s not a very good expe­ri­ence for the cat. It does not ful­fill any fan­tasies about a cat wear­ing a suit of armor.


Though cats were his entry point, De Boer’s sym­pa­thies seem aligned with the under­dog — er, mice. Equip­ping hum­ble, hypo­thet­i­cal crea­tures with exquis­ite­ly wrought, his­tor­i­cal pro­tec­tive gear is a way of push­ing back against being per­ceived dif­fer­ent­ly than one wish­es to be.

Accept­ing an Hon­orary MFA from his alma mater ear­li­er this year, he described an armored mouse as a metaphor for his “ongo­ing cat and mouse rela­tion­ship with the world of fine art…a mis­chie­vous, rebel­lious being who dares to com­pete on his own terms in a world ruled by the cool cats.”

Each tiny piece is pre­ced­ed by painstak­ing research and many ref­er­ence draw­ings, and may incor­po­rate spe­cial mate­ri­als like the Japan­ese silk haori-himo cord lac­ing the shoul­der plates to the body armor of a Samu­rai mouse fam­i­ly.

Addi­tion­al cre­ations have ref­er­enced Mon­go­lian, glad­i­a­tor, cru­sad­er, and Sara­cen styles — this last per­fect for a Per­sian cat.

“I mean, “Why not?” he asks in his TED‑x Talk,Village Idiots & Inno­va­tion, below.

His lat­est work com­bines ele­ments of Maratha and Hus­sar armor in a ver­i­ta­ble puz­zle of minus­cule pieces.

See more of Jeff De Boer’s cat and mouse armor on his Insta­gram.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What’s It Like to Fight in 15th Cen­tu­ry Armor?: A Sur­pris­ing Demon­stra­tion

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

A Record Store Designed for Mice in Swe­den, Fea­tur­ing Albums by Mouse Davis, Destiny’s Cheese, Dol­ly Pars­ley & More

- 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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Why Goya Made His Haunting “Black Paintings” at the End of His Life

in Art, History | October 5th, 2022

Though most of us see Fran­cis­co Goy­a’s Sat­urno devo­ran­do a su hijo, or Sat­urn Devour­ing His Son, at least every few months, we were nev­er meant to see it all. The same is true of all four­teen of the so-called “Black Paint­ings,” which Goya exe­cut­ed late in his life on the walls of his vil­la out­side Madrid. They now hang at the Pra­do where, as one tour guide put it to the Guardian’s Stephen Phe­lan, “some peo­ple can hard­ly even look at them.” When vis­i­tors enter the room that con­tains these often grim and bizarre visions, “they are always sur­prised. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vis­i­tor whose expres­sion hasn’t changed.”

What could have moved Goya to cre­ate such paint­ings? In the new Great Art Explained video essay above, gal­lerist and Youtu­ber James Payne lays out the rel­e­vant fac­tors in Goy­a’s life and the tur­bu­lent soci­ety in which he lived. His Enlight­en­ment views and pen­chant for brazen satire drew sus­pi­cion, as did his will­ing­ness to paint for French and pro-French clients dur­ing that coun­try’s occu­pa­tion of Spain.

At the age of 72 he end­ed up putting him­self into a kind of coun­try­side exile, tak­ing up res­i­dence in an estate called the Quin­ta del Sor­do (the “Vil­la of the Deaf,” and suit­ably enough, since Goya him­self hap­pened to have lost his hear­ing by that point).

It was in the Quin­ta del Sor­do, and indeed on it, that Goya (or, accord­ing to cer­tain the­o­ries, Goy­a’s son) set his artis­tic world­view free to real­ize its most grotesque and jaun­diced forms. Even apart from Sat­urn’s act of can­ni­bal­is­tic fil­i­cide, Phe­lan writes, “a humanoid bil­ly goat in a monk­ish cas­sock bleats a satan­ic ser­mon to a gasp­ing con­gre­ga­tion of witch­es. A des­per­ate­ly expres­sive lit­tle dog appears to plead for res­cue, sub­merged up to its neck in a mud-col­ored mire beneath a gloomy, void-like fir­ma­ment of neg­a­tive space.” Known as El Per­ro, or The Dog, that last art­work is one of the most beloved in Spain — and, in its ascetic way, the most haunt­ing Black Paint­ing of all.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Most Dis­turb­ing Paint­ing: A Close Look at Fran­cis­co Goya’s Sat­urn Devour­ing His Son

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

Art Lovers Rejoice! New Goya and Rem­brandt Data­bas­es Now Online

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

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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Lizzo Plays James Madison’s Priceless, 200-Year-Old Crystal Flute

in History, Music | October 3rd, 2022

In the annals of mod­ern pop­u­lar music, one does not find a sur­feit of flautists. Tim Weis­berg, in part­ner­ship with singer-song­writer Dan Fogel­berg, did score a mod­est his or two in the sev­en­ties. More incon­gru­ous­ly, Jethro Tul­l’s Ian Ander­son set his band apart with his deci­sion to take up the flute not long before their ear­li­est per­for­mances. But today, out­side the realm of orches­tral music, there is sure­ly no high­er-pro­file flautist than Liz­zo. Though best known as a pop singer, she con­tin­ues to put to use the flute skills she honed at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton, with­out which she would­n’t have been able to han­dle a pre­cious piece of Amer­i­can his­to­ry.

Last month, writes the Library of Con­gress’ April Slay­ton, one of that insti­tu­tion’s librar­i­ans Car­la Hay­den “saw that the one and only Liz­zo was com­ing to D.C. for a con­cert.” Giv­en that “the Library has the world’s largest flute col­lec­tion,” Hay­den took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to point out that fact to the pop star on Twit­ter. “One of about 1,700 flutes in the col­lec­tion, she teased, is the crys­tal flute made for Pres­i­dent James Madi­son by Claude Lau­rent — a price­less instru­ment that Dol­ley Madi­son res­cued from the White House in April 1814 as the British entered Wash­ing­ton, DC dur­ing the War of 1812.. Might she want to drop by and play a few bars?”

Indeed she did, with results you can see in the video above: at the Library itself, Liz­zo tries out one of the col­lec­tion’s many flutes; then she plays the crys­tal flute itself on onstage at Capi­tol One Are­na, hav­ing been hand­ed it by the instru­men­t’s own secu­ri­ty detail. “It’s like play­ing out of a wine glass,” she tells her thrilled audi­ence. One won­ders if the com­par­i­son would ever have occurred to its first own­er: “It’s not clear if Madi­son did much with the flute oth­er than admire it,” Slay­ton writes, “but it became a fam­i­ly heir­loom and an arti­fact of the era.” Now it has become a unit­ing sym­bol of Amer­i­can cul­ture past and present: how­ev­er for­ward-look­ing the Found­ing Fathers were, we can safe­ly say they nev­er imag­ine twerk­ing.

The Library of Con­gress has post­ed pic­tures of Liz­zo’s vis­it on Flickr. See them here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

But­ter­fly Lands on Flutist’s Face Dur­ing Flute Com­pe­ti­tion: The Show Must Go On

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute — the World’s Old­est Playable Instru­ment — Get Played Again

The Flute of Shame: Dis­cov­er the Instrument/Device Used to Pub­licly Humil­i­ate Bad Musi­cians Dur­ing the Medieval Peri­od

The Library of Con­gress Makes 25 Mil­lion Records From Its Cat­a­log Free to Down­load

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 It’s Like to Work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconic Office Building

in Architecture, History | September 30th, 2022

Frank Lloyd Wright, who drew so much inspi­ra­tion from the wide open spaces of mid­dle Amer­i­ca, designed just two high-rise build­ings. The sec­ond, com­plet­ed late in his long career, was 1956’s Price Tow­er in Bartlesville, Okla­homa. The first opened six years before that, as an addi­tion to one of his already-famous projects. That was the head­quar­ters of S. C. John­son & Son, bet­ter known as John­son Wax, in Racine, Wis­con­sin. Seen at a dis­tance, the Research Tow­er stands out as the sig­nal fea­ture of the com­plex, but it’s the ear­li­er Admin­is­tra­tion Build­ing that offered the world a glimpse of the future of work.

The Admin­is­tra­tion Build­ing’s con­struc­tion fin­ished in 1939. Back then, says Vox’s Phil Edwards (him­self an estab­lished Wright fan) in the video above, “offices were small and cramped, or pri­vate. This build­ing had a spa­cious cen­tral room instead, meant to encour­age the spread of ideas.” Such a con­cept may sound famil­iar — per­haps all too famil­iar — to any­one who’s ever worked in what we now call an “open-plan office.” But it was dar­ing at the time, and it seems that no archi­tect has ever imple­ment­ed it quite as strik­ing­ly again. What oth­er office makes you “feel like you’re under­wa­ter, that you’re in, maybe, a lily pond”?

That descrip­tion comes from archi­tect and Wright schol­ar Jonathan Lip­man, one of the experts Edwards con­sults on his own pil­grim­age to John­son Wax Head­quar­ters. He want­ed to spend some time work­ing there him­self, some­thing eas­i­ly arranged since S. C. John­son has by now moved most of its oper­a­tions into oth­er facil­i­ties. But how­ev­er sat­is­fy­ing it feels to sit in the shade of Wright’s “den­dri­form columns” sprout­ing through­out the Great Work­room, the expe­ri­ence proves unsat­is­fy­ing. “It was­n’t a real thing with­out any peo­ple around,” Edwards says, “with­out the ener­gy of being in that office.”

Wright spoke of his inten­tions to cre­ate “as inspir­ing a place to work in as any cathe­dral ever was to wor­ship in.” Today, amid the silent absence of typ­ists on the ground floor and man­agers on the mez­za­nine, the Admin­is­tra­tion Build­ing must feel holi­er than ever. The space exudes a mag­nif­i­cent lone­li­ness, and open­ing a Mac­Book to log into Slack sure­ly inten­si­fies the lone­li­ness rather than the mag­nif­i­cence. “In 1939, this was the future of work,” Edwards says. “These big cor­po­rate cam­pus­es, the Googles and Metas and Ama­zons: they owe a debt to this cam­pus here.” But for the increas­ing­ly many liv­ing the remote-work life, even those twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry big-tech head­quar­ters have begun to seem like tem­ples from a pass­ing era.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Japan­ese Mas­ter­piece, the Impe­r­i­al Hotel in Tokyo

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Dog­house, His Small­est Archi­tec­tur­al Cre­ation (1956)

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

When the Indi­ana Bell Build­ing Was Rotat­ed 90° While Every­one Worked Inside in 1930 (by Kurt Vonnegut’s Archi­tect Dad)

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 the Medieval Wound Man: The Poor Soul Who Illustrated the Injuries a Person Might Receive Through War, Accident or Disease

in Art, Biology, Health, History | September 29th, 2022

Do you swoon at the sight of blood?

Suf­fer paper cuts as major trau­ma?

Cov­er your eyes when the knife comes out in the hor­ror movie?

If so, and also if not, fall to your knees and give thanks that you’re not the Wound Man, above.

A sta­ple of medieval med­ical his­to­ry, he’s a gris­ly com­pendi­um of the injuries and exter­nal afflic­tions that might befall a mor­tal of the peri­od- insect and ani­mal bites, spilled entrails, abscess­es, boils, infec­tions, plague-swollen glands, pierc­ings and cuts, both acci­den­tal and delib­er­ate­ly inflict­ed.

Any one of these trou­bles should be enough to fell him, yet he remains upright, dis­play­ing every last one of them simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, his expres­sion sto­ic.

He’s hard to look at, but as art his­to­ri­an Jack Hart­nell , author of Medieval Bod­ies: Life, Death and Art in the Mid­dle Ages writes in British Art Stud­ies:

The Wound Man was not a fig­ure designed to inspire fear or to men­ace. On the con­trary, he rep­re­sent­ed some­thing more hope­ful: an imag­i­na­tive and arrest­ing her­ald of the pow­er­ful knowl­edge that could be chan­nelled and dis­pensed through the prac­tice of medieval med­i­cine.

A valu­able edu­ca­tion­al resource for sur­geons for some three cen­turies, he began crop­ping up in south­ern Ger­many in the ear­ly 1400s. In an essay for the Pub­lic Domain Review, Hart­nell notes how these ear­ly spec­i­mens served “as a human table of con­tents”, direct­ing inter­est­ed par­ties to the spe­cif­ic pas­sages in the var­i­ous med­ical texts where infor­ma­tion on exist­ing treat­ments could be found.

The pro­to­col for injuries to the intestines or stom­ach called for stitch­ing the wound up with a fine thread and sprin­kling it with an anti­he­m­or­rhag­ic pow­der made from wine, hematite, nut­meg, white frank­in­cense, gum ara­bic, bright red sap from the Dra­cae­na cinnabari tree and a restora­tive quan­ti­ty of mum­my.

The Wound Man evolved along with med­ical knowl­edge, weapons of war­fare and art world trends.

The wood­cut Wound Man in Hans von Gersdorff’s 1517 land­mark Field­book of Surgery intro­duces can­non­balls to the ghast­ly mix.

And the engraver Robert White’s Wound Man in British sur­geon John Browne’s 1678 Com­pleat Dis­course of Wounds los­es the loin­cloth and grows his hair, mor­ph­ing into a neo­clas­si­cal beau­ty in the Saint Sebas­t­ian mold.

Sur­gi­cal knowl­edge even­tu­al­ly out­paced the Wound Man’s use­ful­ness, but pop­u­lar cul­ture is far from ready for him to lay down and die, as evi­denced by recent cameos in episodes of Han­ni­bal and the British com­e­dy quiz show, QI.


Delve into the his­to­ry of the Wound Man in Jack Hart­nel­l’s British Art Stud­ies arti­cle “Word­ing the Wound Man.”

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Dis­cov­er the Per­sian 11th Cen­tu­ry Canon of Med­i­cine, “The Most Famous Med­ical Text­book Ever Writ­ten”

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

- 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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When Marlon Brando Refused the Oscar for His Role in The Godfather to Support the Rights of Native Americans (1973)

in History, Television | September 28th, 2022

At the 45th Acad­e­my Awards, Mar­lon Bran­do won the Best Actor award for his per­for­mance in The God­fa­ther — but sent a Native Amer­i­can civ­il rights activist named Sacheen Lit­tle­feath­er to decline it on his behalf. “The twen­ty-six-year-old activist took the stage in a fringed buck­skin dress and moc­casins,” writes the New York­er’s Michael Schul­man. “When she explained that Brando’s rea­sons for refus­ing the award were Hollywood’s mis­treat­ment of Native Amer­i­cans and the stand­off in Wound­ed Knee, South Dako­ta, there were loud boos and scat­tered cheers.”

More sev­en­ties things have hap­pened, but sure­ly not many. With time, Schul­man writes, “the whole thing cement­ed into a pop-cul­ture punch line: preen­ing actor, fake Indi­an” — the “cry­ing Indi­an” envi­ron­men­tal PSA had aired just a few years before — “kitschy Hol­ly­wood freak show. But what if it wasn’t that at all?”

Almost half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, this notable chap­ter in Oscars his­to­ry has come back into the news in the wake of the Acad­e­my of Motion Pic­ture Arts and Sci­ences’ offi­cial apol­o­gy to Lit­tle­feath­er. It’s now more wide­ly under­stood who Lit­tle­feath­er is, and what Bran­do was going for when he made her his emis­sary that night in 1973.

Bran­do was­n’t espe­cial­ly hes­i­tant to explain his actions even at the time: less than three months after the event, he laid out all his rea­sons on The Dick Cavett Show. “I don’t think that peo­ple gen­er­al­ly real­ize what the motion pic­ture indus­try has done to the Amer­i­can Indi­an,” he tells Cavett. “As a mat­ter of fact, all eth­nic groups.” He then runs down the “sil­ly ren­di­tions of human behav­ior” deliv­ered night­ly on tele­vi­sion, high­light­ing the phe­nom­e­non of “Indi­an chil­dren see­ing Indi­ans rep­re­sent­ed as sav­age, as ugly, as nasty, vicious, treach­er­ous, drunk­en.”

Such clichéd por­tray­als were what Bran­do meant to address by speak­ing through Lit­tle­feath­er. But the pub­lic’s imme­di­ate reac­tion, as Cavett puts it, went along the lines of, “There’s Bran­do jump­ing on a social-cause band­wag­on now, get­ting in on the Indi­ans.” They’d for­got­ten that the actor’s con­nec­tion with Native Amer­i­can caus­es went back at least to 1964, when he was arrest­ed at a Pacif­ic North­west “fish-in” by the Puyallup tribe protest­ing the denial of their treaty rights. And as Lit­tle­feath­er’s fêt­ing by the Acad­e­my shows, that con­nec­tion has long sur­vived even Bran­do him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

Albert Ein­stein Sports a Native Amer­i­can Head­dress and a Peace Pipe at the Grand Canyon, 1931

1,000+ Haunt­ing & Beau­ti­ful Pho­tos of Native Amer­i­can Peo­ples, Shot by the Ethno­g­ra­ph­er Edward S. Cur­tis (Cir­ca 1905)

The God­fa­ther With­out Bran­do?: It Almost Hap­pened

How Dick Cavett Brought Sophis­ti­ca­tion to Late Night Talk Shows: Watch 270 Clas­sic Inter­views 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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