The Book of St Albans, One of the Finest Medieval Manuscripts, Gets Digitized and Put Online

in Books, History | July 26th, 2022

This past month, on the eve of the June 22nd feast of St Alban, the library of Trinity College Dublin announced that it had digitized the “13th century masterpiece” the Book of St Alban, a richly illustrated manuscript that “features 54 individual works of medieval art and has fascinated readers across the centuries, from royalty to renaissance scholars.”

Created by the Benedictine monk Matthew Paris, the manuscript “chronicles the life of St Alban,” notes The Irish Times, “and also outlines the construction of St Alban’s Cathedral in Hertfordshire.” The text and illustrations explain the origins of a cult of St. Alban, the first English martyr, that began to spring up after his 4th century death.

According to the Venerable Bede, the English monk who wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the martyrdom of Alban involved a few miraculous events. Sentenced to die for his refusal to renounce Christianity, Alban supposedly petitioned God to dry up the River Ver so he could more quickly reach the place of his execution.

This miracle caused Alban’s Roman executioner to fall to his feet, spontaneously convert, and refuse to kill the saint. A second executioner stepped in to behead them both, whereupon this man’s eyes popped out of his head. “He who gave the wicked stroke,” writes Bede, “was not permitted to rejoice over the deceased; for his eyes dropped upon the ground together with the blessed martyr’s head.”

In the illustration of this grisly story (top) from the manuscript, we see the executioner holding his eyes in his hand, and Alban’s head appears to have been caught by the hair on a tree branch above. Another illustration, further up, shows a character named Heraclius making off with Alban’s head.

In a later legend, Alban’s head rolled to the bottom of Holywell Hill, and a well sprang from where it came to rest. On the supposed site of Alban’s execution now stands St Albans Cathedral, once St Albans Abbey, where the Book of St Albans remained for 300 years until Henry VIII dissolved Britain’s monasteries in 1539.

The book is written in both Latin and Anglo-Norman French, “which made it accessible to a wider secular audience including educated noble women,” Trinity College’s Caoimhe Ni Lochlainn writes. “It was borrowed by noble ladies of the period, including the King’s sister-in-law Countess of Cornwall, Sanchia of Provence, and others.”

The manuscript eventually made its way to Trinity College Dublin in 1661, where it has remained ever since, and where its “mostly framed narrative scenes” have been admired by a select few. Now everyone can access the book and its illustrations, made with a “tinted drawing technique,” Lochlainn notes, “where outlined drawings are highlighted with colored washes from a limited palette. This technique was distinctly English, dating back to the Anglo Saxon art of the 10th century.”

See all the grisly details of this fascinating artifact at Trinity College Dublin’s Digital Collections, and learn more about the manuscript in the video just above.

The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe: A Free Online Course from the University of Colorado

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

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

When Erik Satie Took a Picture of Debussy & Stravinsky (June 1910)

in History, Music, Photography | July 25th, 2022

Erik Satie knew his way around not just the piano but the camera as well. This is evidenced by the image above, a 1911 portrait of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. Described by Christie’s as “an outstanding photograph of the two composers in the library at Debussy’s home,” it was taken by Satie at the time when Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes were performing Debussy’s Jeux and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. In the background appears what looks like Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, a work of art “used by Debussy on the front cover of the first edition of his symphonic sketches La mer.”

Just above appears another picture captured in Debussy’s home, this one of Debussy and Satie. “The photo was taken by Stravinsky, if my memory didn’t go wrong,” says one commenter on the r/classicalmusic subreddit. Another expresses confusion about the subjects themselves: “I thought they didn’t like each other?”

One responder explains that “they were friends at first, for quite some time, but later their relationship got worse.” Debussy’s orchestration of Satie’s Gymnopedies brought those pieces to prominence, but, Satie ultimately came to feel that Debussy had been stingy with the fruits of his great success.

Or so, at any rate, goes one interpretation of the dissolution of Debussy and Satie’s friendship. Different Redditors contribute different details: one that “every time they met, Satie would praise Ravel’s music to annoy Debussy,” another that “Debussy kept a bottle of the cheapest table wine for Satie for when he came over.” It can hardly have been easy, even in the best of times, for two of the strongest innovators in early-twentieth-century music to occupy the same social space for long stretches of time, let alone in company that included the likes of Ravel and Stravinsky. More than a century later, their artistic legacies could hardly be more assured — as, one faintly senses when looking at these photos, they knew would be the case.

Hear the Very First Pieces of Ambient Music, Erik Satie’s Furniture Music (Circa 1917)

Watch the 1917 Ballet “Parade”: Created by Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso & Jean Cocteau, It Provoked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Surrealism”

The Night When Charlie Parker Played for Igor Stravinsky (1951)

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai: An Introduction to the Iconic Japanese Woodblock Print in 17 Minutes

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Behold a Book of Color Shades Depicted with Feathers (Circa 1915)

in Design, Fashion, History, Museums, Science | July 25th, 2022

Perhaps the 143 colors showcased in The Bayer Company’s early 20th-century sample book, Shades on Feathers, could be collected in the field, but it would involve a lot of travel and patience, and the stalking of several endangered if not downright extinct avian species.

Far easier, and much less expensive, for milliners, designers and decorators to dye plain white feathers exotic shades, following the instructions in the sample book.

Such artificially obtained rainbows owe a lot to William Henry Perkin, a teenage student of German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann, who spent Easter vacation of 1856 experimenting with aniline, an organic base his teacher had earlier discovered in coal tar. Hoping to hit on a synthetic form of quinine, he accidentally hit on a solution that colored silk a lovely purple shade — an inadvertent eureka moment that ranks right up there with penicillin and the pretzel.

A Science Museum Group profile details what happened next:

Perkin named the colour mauve and the dye mauveine. He decided to try to market his discovery instead of returning to college.

On 26 August 1856, the Patent Office granted Perkin a patent for ‘a new colouring matter for dyeing with a lilac or purple colour stuffs of silk, cotton, wool, or other materials’.

Perkin’s next step was to interest cloth dyers and printers in his discovery. He had no experience of the textile trade and little knowledge of large-scale chemical manufacture. He corresponded with Robert and John Pullar in Glasgow, who offered him support. Perkin’s luck changed towards the end of 1857 when the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, decided that mauve was the colour to wear. In January 1858, Queen Victoria followed suit, wearing mauve to her daughter’s wedding.

Cue an explosion of dye manufacturers across Great Britain and Europe, including Bayer, producer of the feather sample book. The survival of this artifact is somewhat miraculous given how vulnerable antique feathers are to environmental factors, pests, and improper storage.

(The sample book recommends cleaning the feathers prior to dying in a lukewarm solution of small amounts of olive oil soap and ammonia.)

The Science History Institute, owner of this unusual object, estimates that the undated book was produced between 1913 and 1918, the year the Migratory Bird Act Treaty outlawed the hunting of birds whose feathers humans deemed particularly fashionable.

Peruse the Science History Institute of Philadelphia’s digitized copy of the Shades on Feathers sample book here.

via Messy Nessy

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- 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.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Free Documentaries from Spain Let You Watch the Traditional Making of Wine, Cheese, Churros, Honey & More

in Film, History | July 22nd, 2022

The Spanish filmmaker Eugenio Monesma has dedicated his life to capturing the traditions of his homeland and its surrounding areas. He began his career by first taking up a Super‑8 camera at age 25 back in the nineteen-seventies, and in the decades since, his mission has taken him to the furthest corners of Spain and beyond in search of ever-older ways to preserve in detail. This places his work in the tradition of the anthropological or ethnographic documentary. But in a still-unconventional move in his field, he’s united the old with the new by creating his own Youtube channel on which to make his documentaries free to watch around the world.

Launched in 2020, Monesma’s channel has become a surprising hit. At the top of the post you can watch its most popular video, his short 1997 documentary on the making of combs from animal horns — which, as of this writing, has racked up nearly 8.5 million views. This happens to be one of the productions that took him beyond Spain’s borders, if only just: to the French village of Lesparrou, specifically, which maintained its small horn comb factories until the end of the twentieth century.

Their process is narrated in the immaculate Spanish diction of Monesma himself, but you can also take your pick of subtitles in more than a dozen other languages. Other of his documentaries that have become popular on Youtube include documentaries on the traditional making of cheese, silk, wine, pottery, honey and wax, knives, and leather.

Many of these videos run under twenty minutes; some reach nearly feature length. All of them satisfy a desire, which now seems widely felt among viewers of Youtube, to witness thoroughly analog processes that have been in use, changing and evolving only gradually, for long stretches of history.

And the fact that the things made so often look delicious certainly doesn’t make Monesma’s work less compelling: take, for example, the artisanal churros of Pamplona’s Churrería de la Mañueta, whose appeal is surely universal. In Korea, where I live, the past decade has a fad for churros elaborately coated and topped with colors and flavors unknown to tradition, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious what Monesma would have to say about it.

How Korean Things Are Made: Watch Mesmerizing Videos Showing the Making of Traditional Clothes, Teapots, Buddhist Instruments & More

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Give Duke Ellington the Pulitzer Prize He Was Denied in 1965

in History, Music | July 21st, 2022

Image by Louis Panassié, via Wikimedia Commons

Duke Ellington has been commemorated in a variety of forms: statues, murals, schools, and even United States commemorative stamps and coins. In his lifetime he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Légion d’honneur. His posthumous honors even include a Special Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1999, the centennial year of his birth. 34 years earlier, in 1965, he’d been named for–but ultimately denied–a regular Pulitzer Prize for Music, a decision his appreciators are now trying to reverse.

“The jury that judged the entrants that year decided to do something different,” writes jazz critic Ted Gioia. “They recommended giving the honor to Duke Ellington for the ‘vitality and originality of his total productivity’ over the course of more than forty years.” This broke from tradition in that the Pulitzer Prize for Music usually honors a single work: in 1945 it went to Aaron Copland for his ballet Appalachian Spring; in 1958 it went to Samuel Barber for his opera Vanessa; in 1960 it went to Elliott Carter for his Second String Quartet.

Alas, “the Pulitzer Board refused to accept the decision of the jury, and decided it would be better to give out no award, rather than honor Duke Ellington. Two members of the three-person judging panel, Winthrop Sargeant and Robert Eyer, resigned in the aftermath.” Ellington, for his part, reacted to this unfortunate development with characteristic equanimity: “Fate is being kind to me,” he told the press. “Fate doesn’t want me to be famous too young” — to which Gioia adds that “he was 66 years old at the time, and in the final decade of his life.”

In an effort to retroactively award Ellington his Pulitzer Prize for Music, Gioia has has launched an online petition. If you sign it, you’ll join the likes of John Adams, Michael Dirda, Steve Reich, and Gene Weingarten, all Pulitzer winners themselves, as well as other luminaries and enthusiasts who’ve voiced their support — nearly 9,000 of them as of this writing. “We assume that Pulitzers are awarded to work that qualifies as for the ages, that pushes the envelope, that suggests not just cleverness but genius,” writes the New York Times’ John McWhorter. “There can be no doubt that Ellington’s corpus fits that definition.”

Reversing the committee decision of 1965, Gioia writes, would enhance “the prestige and legitimacy of the Pulitzer — and every award needs that nowadays, when many have grown skeptical about our leading prizes.” What’s more, “it’s the proper thing for the music — because every time genuine artistry is recognized it sets an example for the present generation, and lays a foundation for the future.” In recent decades, the aesthetic range of Pulitzer-honored music has widened considerably: McWhorter points as an example to 2018’s winner, Kendrick Lamar’s album Damn. It could be that, as far as Ellington is concerned, it’s taken the rest of us 57 years to catch up with him. Sign the petition here.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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

in Architecture, History | July 20th, 2022

Tokyo once had a hotel by Frank Lloyd Wright. Such an architectural asset, one might assume, would be preserved at all costs, yet this one was demolished in 1967. But the fact that Wright’s Imperial Hotel stood for only 45 years won’t surprise anyone familiar with Japanese building culture, nor will the fact that it was only one of a series of Imperial Hotels that have occupied the same site. As evidenced by the Ise Grand Shrine, which has been demolished and rebuilt every twenty years since the eighth century, a structure’s value in Japan has nothing to do with its longevity. Still, this explanation may not satisfy Wright enthusiasts, the great majority of whom have only been able to see the master’s most famous Japanese building in photographs, diagrams, and postcards.

Just this year, the Frank Lloyd Trust has given us a way to experience it as nobody could in its heyday: a virtual tour video “shot” from the perspective of a flying drone. (Watch above.) It comes as an entry in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Works, which “brings Wright’s demolished and unrealized structures to life through immersive digital animations reconstructed from Wright’s original plans and drawings, along with archival photographs.”

Here we have Wright’s East-meets-West masterpiece reconstructed just as it must have looked when it opened on September 1st, 1923 — the same day, coincidentally, as the Great Kantō earthquake that devastated Tokyo. The Imperial Hotel took some damage, but came through intact.

A lesser earthquake had already struck the previous year, but it left the hotel unharmed despite its still being under construction. (The same can’t be said of the fragile remains of the original Imperial Hotel, built in 1890 and gutted by fire in 1922, that Wright had been commissioned to replace.) But over subsequent decades, time took its toll in other ways: “the Wright-designed Imperial would eventually be considered by the post-war traveler to be dark and musty,” writes Steve Sundberg at Old Tokyo, “and its un-air-conditioned rooms too small. The hotel’s foundation, too, had by then settled unevenly into the soft subsoil; its long hallways and corridors came to have a wavy, rubbery appearance about them.”

Even when new, the Imperial Hotel had its discomforts: Sundberg quotes a 1925 Far Eastern Review article calling it “a hundred years ahead of the age in its architectural features and fifty years behind in many things which make for the comfort of its patrons.” Wright “sacrificed everything to his art, raising a monument to his genius and bequeathing to the Japanese the difficult task of making it a financial success.” It was financial exigencies, in part, that motivated its demolition and replacement with a third, high-rise Imperial Hotel in 1967 — whose own impending demolition and replacement was announced just last year. France-based Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane has produced a design for the fourth Imperial Hotel; what tribute, if any, it pays Wright’s legacy we’ll only find out when it opens in 2036.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Never-Seen Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait Discovered Behind an Earlier Painting

in Art, History | July 18th, 2022

The name of Vincent Van Gogh is one of the very best known in the history of painting, and indeed the history of art. But that doesn’t mean the man himself enjoyed any success in his short lifetime. Though he was convinced that he was creating “the art of the future,” and seemingly right to believe it, the buyers of nineteenth-century European art didn’t see it quite that way. Consequently impoverished, Van Gogh had to resort to unconventional strategies to maintain his artistic productivity. Instead of professional models, for example, he hired peasants and people from the streets. And when he couldn’t paint them, he painted himself.

Van Gogh would also economize by re-using his canvases, a practice not unknown in his day. “However, instead of painting over earlier works,” writes Jordan Ogg at National Galleries Scotland, “he would turn the canvas around and work on the reverse.”

It seems he did this with the National Galleries Scotland’s own Head of a Peasant Woman, whose back side turns out to bear a hitherto unknown self-portrait hidden by “layers of glue and cardboard” for well over a century. X‑ray analysis has revealed “a bearded sitter in a brimmed hat with a neckerchief loosely tied at the throat. He fixes the viewer with an intense stare, the right side of his face in shadow and his left ear clearly visible.”

Even in its ghostly lack of detail, this face seems to be unmistakable. If it belongs to who we think it does, it will become the 36th known Van Gogh self-portrait. It would have been painted before 1884’s Head of a Peasant Woman, “during a key moment in Van Gogh’s career, when he was exposed to the work of the French impressionists after moving to Paris.” You can learn about the ongoing process of this lost self-portrait’s rediscovery in the video at the top of the post. Van Gogh expressed conviction that he was painting for later generations, but surely even he would be astounded at the excitement of twenty-first century curators about finding another of his self portraits — and one he saw fit to give the cardboard treatment at that.

Behold the Newly Discovered Sketch by Vincent van Gogh Sketch, “Study for Worn Out” (1882)

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

30,000 Photographs of Black History & Culture Are Available Online in a New Getty Images Archive

in Archives, History, Photography | July 15th, 2022

Image of Charles S.L. Baker with his Superheating Demonstration

Black History Month is February in the United States and Canada, and October in the United Kingdom and Europe. It may be July right now, but if you’re interested in a subject, there’s no reason not to get more deeply into it all year round. This is underscored by the opening, this month, of Getty Images’ Black History and Culture Collection. As Petapixel’s Matt Growcoot writes, it contains “30,000 rarely seen images of the Black diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States that date back to the 19th century,” drawing from the domains of “politics, sport, music, culture, military, and celebrity.”

In the Black History and Culture Collection you’ll find pictures of cultural figures like Duke Ellington and Jay‑Z, Jack Johnson, Venus and Serena Williams, Sojourner Truth, and Bernardine Evaristo. These names only hint at the range of the archive, which you can also browse by category tags: “civil rights,” “governance,” and “sports,” to name a few examples, but also “families,” “fashion,” and “hair.”

There are, of course, an enormous number of photos filed under “American Culture,” which would itself be unimaginable without the contributions of the people documented. But the same could be said of the other side of the pond; hence the inclusion of a “Black British Culture” label as well.

Creating the Black History and Culture Collection involved more than just tagging photos. You can learn more about what went into it in the short video above, which includes the voices of collaborators like NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Deborah Willis and the University of Pennsylvania’s Tukufu Zuberi. The artist Renata Cherlise speaks of the value of the images of famous people, but also those of everyday life as it was lived in places and times like Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the nineteen-forties. Whether or not your own heritage is tied into this history, you stand to learn a great deal from it. As Zuberi put sit, “Black culture is the original human culture, so there is no culture that is alien to black culture. The future of black culture is the future of human culture. Let’s go.”

via Petapixel/Colossal

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Book of St Albans, One of the Finest Medieval Manuscripts, Gets Digitized and Put Online

When Erik Satie Took a Picture of Debussy & Stravinsky (June 1910)

Behold a Book of Color Shades Depicted with Feathers (Circa 1915)

Free Documentaries from Spain Let You Watch the Traditional Making of Wine, Cheese, Churros, Honey & More

Give Duke Ellington the Pulitzer Prize He Was Denied in 1965

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

Never-Seen Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait Discovered Behind an Earlier Painting

30,000 Photographs of Black History & Culture Are Available Online in a New Getty Images Archive

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