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There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Vikings who raided and then settled in England. The main documentary source for the period, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, simply tells us that Viking armies raided Britain’s coastline from the late eighth century. Raiding was followed by settlement, and by the 870s, the Vikings had established a territory in the north and east of the country which later became known as the ‘Danelaw’. Here, the Chronicle famously records, Scandinavian armies ‘shared out the land… and proceeded to plough and to support themselves’.

Despite over 50 years of research, many fundamental questions about the Scandinavian settlements remain unanswered: which areas of England saw the greatest settlement? How many settlers were there? Did they get on with the locals? Were they all men? Until recently, there was little in the physical record to provide answers. Archaeological traces of Scandinavian settlement were notably few: just a handful of Scandinavian-style burials and rural settlements have been found in England, for instance, while the Scandinavian contribution to urban development and certain strands of material culture, such as stone sculpture, remains elusive.

Within the last 20-25 years, this picture has changed dramatically. Thanks largely to metal-detecting, there has been an explosion of new finds of Viking-Age metalwork recovered from areas of known Scandinavian settlement. Surprisingly prominent within the new finds is female jewellery in Scandinavian styles: brooches and pendants worn by women in everyday dress. To date, over 500 such items have been found, scattered across large swathes of rural England.

The date of the jewellery chimes exactly with written accounts of the settlement (c. 870-950). Its careful study reveals that while some items were made locally after a Scandinavian fashion, others are likely to have been imported from the Scandinavian homelands, probably on the clothing of female settlers. Although Anglo-Saxon women also wore brooches, they were of a very different style to those favoured by Scandinavian women, so it’s clear that the new jewellery finds represent a distinctly ‘foreign’ dress element. The jewellery being unearthed in England is strikingly similar to that found in Scandinavia, particularly its southern regions: there are disc, trefoil, lozenge, oval, and bird shaped brooches decorated with animals and plants from the Scandinavian art styles of Borre, Jellinge, Mammen and Urnes. Encountering women on a walk around tenth-century Norfolk, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in Denmark.

Viking-Age Scandinavian-style brooches from England

The discovery of such artefacts is unexpected, not only because such jewellery was unknown in England a generation ago, but also because it helps to elucidate a population group with has, until now, been largely invisible. Faced with a dearth of both archaeological and written evidence for Scandinavian women in England, historians have tended to assume that settlement was carried out entirely by men, who took wives among the local population. The jewellery offers the first tangible archaeological evidence for a significant female Scandinavian population in Viking-Age England, potentially numbering in the thousands. In this way, it is revealing the presence of women we never expected to see.

Women were not merely participants in the settlement process; they were active agents in negotiating relationships with the existing, Anglo-Saxon population. Their jewellery became a platform for the expression of cultural values, usually in a way that maintained Scandinavian traditions. One observable trend is that female dress in the Danelaw preserved Scandinavian preferences for particular brooches long after they had fallen out of fashion in the homelands. This deliberately archaising suggests that articulating historical ties via jewellery was important in a new settlement context, when cultural memories were likely to be challenged. The fact that it was done through women’s dress highlights a role for women as bearers of cultural tradition in Danelaw society.

The jewellery also provides a fresh perspective on one of the most elusive of topics regarding the Viking settlements, namely, their location. We tend to think of Yorkshire and the north-east Midlands as Viking hotspots, due in part to the areas’ Scandinavian-style place-names and stone-sculpture (as well as the success of the Jorvik Viking centre). Yet female jewellery here is rare, being concentrated instead in rural Norfolk and Lincolnshire. These areas are not commonly associated with Viking activity, but it is clear that they were exposed to strong Scandinavian cultural influence, at least in terms of female dress. Of course, the distribution pattern has to be interpreted with care: jewellery is eminently portable, and levels of metal-detecting can vary from county to county. Nonetheless, it does seem that East Anglia and Lincolnshire were vibrant centres of Scandinavian culture in ninth- and tenth-century England, to an extent not previously recognised. Once again, the jewellery shines new light on this historically dark period of British history, revealing the presence of peoples in areas we never knew were there.

Jane Kershaw is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at University College London. Jane Kershaw is the author of Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England (OUP, 2013).

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Image credit: Both images © Norfolk County Council; do not reproduce without permission.

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For many years, answering polite enquiries about my current book project was relatively easy: I could explain that it was about Milton, or the Bible, or Renaissance art and architecture, or the decorative arts, or whatever might be the topic, and the conversation could happily proceed to more interesting subjects. For the past few years, however, I have had to say that I was writing a book about ornamental hermits in eighteenth-century gardens. A few – very few – interlocutors have been able to say “ah yes”, either because they were good at bluffing or because they actually knew a little about garden hermits, but most have assumed politely that I had fallen off my trolley and was descending from cultural history into incoherent mutterings.

The hermitage at Brocklesby Park is of the type known as a root house.

I became interested in the subject some 40 years ago, when I chanced upon Edith Sitwell’s essay on “Ancients and Ornamental Hermits”. The idea of keeping an ornamental hermit in one’s garden was entirely new to me, and I certainly could not afford to engage one, but I did resolve to learn what I could about this phenomenon when I had time to do so. A professional career intervened, and so the idea marinated in my mind for decades before I could clear the space to undertake the requisite research. Finding the hermits and their hermitages was challenging, as ornamental hermits tend not to appear in the usual records, and hermitages are often overlooked in architectural histories. Mere facts, however, can often be uncovered by the dogged researcher. Understanding the phenomenon of the garden hermit has been a much more difficult task. At one level, ornamental hermits seem merely frivolous, but their existence hints at a complex and serious strain in Georgian culture.

Garden hermits were variously real people, automatons and wholly imagined people who had perpetually stepped out for a minute, leaving their eyeglasses and a book on the table of the hermitage. The most substantial material remains of these hermits are their hermitages, which are scattered across Britain and Ireland. At Brocklesby Park, the Lincolnshire seat of the Pelham family, the hermitage is of the type known as a root house, and what seems to be the original furniture survives inside, including a table made from a bole, a rustic hermit’s chair formed from branches, and four visitors’ chairs carved out of solid tree trunks. At Killerton, the Devonshire home of the Acland family (now National Trust), there is a luxury three-room hermitage known as the Bear’s Hut (which once accommodated a pet black bear brought from Canada); one of the rooms is the (imaginary) hermit’s chapel, which has a full-length lancet window inserted into a shaped tree trunk and fitted with Netherlandish painted glass panels.

The Bear’s Hut at Killerton.

Aspiring hermits could advertise their availability for employment. Similarly, landlords could advertise for hermits, though as Lady Croom (in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia) comments, “surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence”.  One of my favourite hermits is the Reverend Henry White, whose day job was that of rector and schoolmaster at Fyfield, near Andover (Hampshire), but whose vocation as a young man was that of hermit to his brother Gilbert White, the author of The Natural History of Selborne. Henry was, like Gilbert, a naturalist and diarist, but he also happily donned the costume of a hermit to entertain Gilbert’s guests while they munched on the cantaloupe that he grew in his garden. In the summer of 1763 Gilbert White entertained the three daughters of an eminent physician at Selborne, and Henry the Hermit was regularly in sociable attendance. When one of the sisters had to leave, Henry lamented her departure in verse:

The hoary hermit in his calm retreat,
No longer safe from her resistless charms;
With trembling hand, dim eye, and faltering feet,
Sighs out his dotage o’er her snowy arms!

Henry so enjoyed playing the part of the ornamental hermit that he had himself painted in front of the hermitage; the painting now hangs at Dunham Massey, a National Trust property in Cheshire.

The fashion for the ornamental hermit has faded, but we still have human figures in our gardens. Indeed, one of the figures had has filled the void left by the ornamental hermit is the humble garden gnome, which has for many years suffered the ignominy of exclusion from the Chelsea Flower Show (gnomes are far too working-class for Chelsea), but nonetheless embodies a quiet dignity that recalls its heroic past as a human figure in the eighteenth-century landscape garden.

Gordon Campbell is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University of Leicester. His books for OUP include Bible: The Story of the King James Version, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought, and The Grove Encyclopedia of Northern Renaissance Art. His most recent book is The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome.

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Image credit: Images © Professor Gordon Campbell. Do not reproduce without permission.

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At the turn of the 20^th century, the baseball team in Brooklyn was known as the Superbas and they played ball at Washington Park, between First and Third streets along Third Avenue near the Gowanus Canal. While the park was convenient for its patrons, located in a densely developed part of the borough and connected to trolley lines on 3^rd and 5^th avenues, fans and players frequently complained about the awful odors emanating from the canal and nearby industrial works.

By the end of the aughts, Charles Ebbets, team owner and president, had grown unsatisfied with these rented grounds, even after spending significant money to upgrade and enlarge the seating area in 1907. In addition to the odors and the limited capacity of its wooden grandstand (undoubtedly a fire trap), the owner was unhappy with those who watched the games for free from the roofs of nearby tenements and the adjacent American Can Factory. At the same time, the advent of reinforced concrete was ushering in a building boom in baseball; several of Brooklyn’s rivals had already built or were in the process of erecting larger, “fireproof” ballparks.

After touring some of these newly built parks, including Shibe Park in Philadelphia and Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Ebbets hired the architect Clarence Randall Van Buskirk to design the franchise a modern ballpark with more seats and fan comforts commensurate with these facilities. Van Buskirk worked on plans in secrecy for over a year, while Ebbets, through a dummy company began buying up properties on a large block bound by Bedford Avenue and Montgomery just east of Prospect Park. The subterfuge was intended to prevent landowners to squeeze him on the lots that would comprise the ballpark assemblage.

Ebbets Field, New York City, on opening day, 1913. Via WikiCommons

In 1913, the team moved to Ebbets Field at 55 Sullivan Place, in what is now considered the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Like the new ballparks of its rivals, Ebbets Field was a two-tier concrete pavilion concentrating seating around home plate, which was strategically placed near the block’s narrower southwest corner. With its gracefully arched brick window bays, pilasters, Corinthian columns and roof ornament, Ebbets Field was one of the more elegant of the ballparks constructed during this era. Its entry rotunda at the corner of Sullivan Place and Cedar Place (now McKeever Place), featured marble wall treatments, gilded ticket cages, and a marble mosaic floor inlaid with a stitched baseball pattern at its center, while a 12-arm “bat-and-ball” chandelier hung from the stuccoed ceiling above. But like its counterparts in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit, Ebbets Field was less an architectural gem and more of a utilitarian structure that could be incrementally expanded as the team’s market grew (unlike CitiField or the new Yankee Stadium, which were designed and built in its more or less final form). Starting with an initial capacity of 18,000, additions to the stadium over the years — enlarging bleachers and extending the upper deck around the lower seating bowl — brought the park’s capacity to 34,000 by 1937 and filled out its footprint with all but its left field bleachers, covered in two decks.

When Ebbets Field was completed in 1913, its market was relatively local, with most fans traveling to the park by trolley, subway or elevated train, or on foot. Indeed when unveiling the plans for the park, Dodger management boasted that the field was in proximity to 15 points of transit that connected to 38 different transit lines. Aside from cementing the franchise’s nickname as the “Trolley Dodgers,” or later, just Dodgers (officially becoming the teams name in 1932 after 18 years as the Robins), its location was also well connected to growth markets in southern and eastern Brooklyn, areas that were still developing during the 1910s. But by the 1950s, the park’s location had become a liability, ill-suited to the growing metropolitan scale of its fan base, who were now spreading out across Long Island and throughout the region. The stadium offered only 750 parking spaces and no nearby highway access. Even if Robert Moses had accommodated then Dodger owner Walter O’Malley’s 1955 request to move the Dodgers to the more centrally located site at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, where the Brooklyn Nets now play basketball, Ebbets Field would have still met the same fate, demolished in the 1960 to facilitate the construction of an apartment complex.

The demise of Ebbets Field was not terribly different than other beloved parks of its day. Beginning in the 1950s, major league teams demanded new, larger stadiums on sites accessible to suburban fan bases within their own or new cities. In 1957, when the Dodgers left Brooklyn along with the Giants who left Manhattan for San Francisco, other teams were doing the same (the Boston Braves, St. Louis Browns and Philadelphia Athletics and Washington Senators all relocated during the 1950s). During the following decade, most of the teams that did not relocate, received new, taxpayer-financed stadiums on spacious sites well connected to regional highways, much like what the Dodgers replacement, the New York Mets received when Shea Stadium was completed in Queens in 1964.

These trends resulted in the eventual demolition of all but two ballparks from the early 20^th century era, Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway Park in Boston (the last to be taken down was Tiger Stadium in 2009 on Detroit’s Westside, a loss still mourned by many Tiger fans). Yet a generation and a half later, most of the mid-century parks have been demolished as well (Dodger Stadium in L.A. is one of the few survivors). Again threatening relocation, teams have demanded and received (mostly) downtown sites for the construction of nostalgically inspired, amenity-laden palaces mostly paid for with public money, and an ever larger share of the profits they generate. We preserve ballparks in memory more than in actual conservation of bricks and masonry.

Few current Brooklynites ever saw the Brooklyn Dodgers play, and likewise, there are only a few Dodger fans who possess memories of the team’s 1940s-50s golden era and its stellar roster of players, including future hall of famers Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Roy Campenella. As the Dodgers begin their 51^st season at Dodger Stadium (and their 55^th in L.A.), they have played there for six more seasons (and counting) than their 45-year run at Ebbets Field. While memories of the Dodgers grow more distant from the collective consciousness of Brooklyn’s 2.6 million residents, the team’s legacy is still very much with us. The design of the Met’s new home, CitiField in Queens, was inspired by Ebbets Field and includes an updated version of the park’s famed rotunda. And bringing the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn has been justified in part as returning a major league team to the borough which lost the Dodgers.

As part of the Atlantic Yards project, city and state leaders gave the Nets a home at Flatbush and Atlantic avenues, the location denied the Dodgers, and conflated bygone allegiances, rivalries, and civic identities. Playing now in an arena named for a global bank amid a constellation of well gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods, the Nets betray the “old school” image they attempt cultivate through their branding strategy and marketing campaigns. Tying the Nets identity specifically to Brooklyn rather than “New York” — a regional catch all that encompasses over 20 million people — captures both the nostalgia for the Dodgers and Brooklyn’s relatively recent ascension as hippest place in the universe. Time will tell if it was a wise long term strategy. Surely public money spent to lure the Nets in and subsidize Atlantic Yards could have been better spent.

Looking southwest across Bedford Avenue at Ebbets Field Apartments on a mostly sunny afternoon. Photo by Jim Henderson, public domain via WikiCommons

By contrast, the 1,300-unit housing complex, the Ebbets Field Apartments, which replaced the beloved home of the Dodgers, was a more modest and far better public investment. The immense rental complex, whose 26-story towers dwarf the more modestly scaled development east of Prospect Park, is architecturally uninspiring and a mere footnote in the history of the borough. Yet it serves a vital function, being built as part of New York State’s Mitchell Lama program, which sought to increase the supply of affordable housing for New York’s rapidly diminishing middle class of the 1960s and 1970s (the complex’s owner opted out of Mitchell Lama in 1987). Similarly, the site of the Polo Grounds, the Giants home until they left for San Francisco was rebuilt in the mid-1960s as public housing. While these developments do little to excite our collective memory or sense of community, they continue to serve as the homes of thousands of New Yorkers and perhaps will continue to do so long after the Mets, Nets, and the region’s other sports franchises again demand new facilities.

Daniel Campo is assistant professor at the School of Architecture & Planning at Morgan State University. He is the author of the forthcoming The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned (Fordham University Press, August 2013).

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How do you view art forgers?

Click here to view the embedded video.

What provokes an art forger to commit forgery?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jonathon Keats is a critic, journalist and artist. He is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine, and has contributed art criticism to Art & Antiques, Art + Auction, Art in America, ARTnews, Artweek, and Salon.com. His arts writing has also appeared in Wired Magazine, ForbesLife Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is the author of Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age and Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology. His conceptual art has been exhibited at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Wellcome Collection.

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The Duke of Wellington always has a traffic cone on his head. At least, he does when he is in Glasgow. Let me explain: outside the city’s Gallery of Modern Art on Queen Street, there is an equestrian statue of the celebrated general of the Napoleonic Wars. It was sculpted in 1840-4 by the Franco-Italian artist, Carlo Marochetti (1805-1867), who in his day was a dominant figure in the world of commemorative sculpture. Amongst his works is the statue of Richard the Lionheart, who has sat on his mount and held aloft his sword outside the Houses of Parliament since 1860.

Yet Glasgow’s lofty monument has been a magnet for pranksters –  ever since the 1980s, according to the BBC – who regularly scale the pedestal, Copenhagen’s (the horse’s) flanks and then, clinging onto the Iron Duke himself, crown him with an orange traffic cone. This has caused some controversy: the police warn that the acts of intrepid, late-night climbers (who, to be frank, may also have enjoyed the hospitality of the local hostelries) is an act of vandalism and is downright dangerous. The government-funded agency that oversees the care of the country’s historic buildings, Historic Scotland, acknowledges that embellishing Wellington with a modern piece of traffic paraphernalia is now a ‘longstanding tradition’, but emphasises that the statue is A-listed and so needs to be protected from damage – and there has indeed been damage: on different occasions, the general has lost a spur and his sword. Others argue that the ‘coning’ of Wellington is a worthy expression of the people’s sense of humour and that it is as much a part of the cityscape as its historic buildings and monuments. And indeed the statue has become iconic – not because it is a likeness of the Duke of Wellington, but because the general has a cone on his head: postcards proudly depicting this symbol of Glaswegian humour are easy to find.

This controversy sprang to mind when I was first putting together a proposal for writing a Very Short Introduction on the Napoleonic Wars. One of the reviewers very helpfully suggested that the book might consider a chapter on the conflict in historical memory and commemoration. When I came to write this, the final chapter, I considered opening it with an account of the ‘coning’ of the Duke of Wellington, but in the end I felt that such irreverence and jocularity sat rather uneasily with the content of the rest of the book, which tells a tale of aggression, international collapse, and human suffering. Yet the fact that the Duke still sits, as ever, with a garish point on his head – gravity making it lean at a jaunty angle – did make me wonder about how far the Napoleonic Wars (including, by extension, the French Revolutionary Wars from which they emerged – collectively the wars lasted from 1792 to 1815) have left a legacy that is embedded, visibly or otherwise, in our European cityscapes.

This might well be more obvious on the continent than in the British Isles, since there was a direct impact as armies rampaged across Europe – and there were therefore more sites clearly associated with Napoleonic conquest, European resistance to it, and later commemoration of the conflict. In Paris, the very same Marochetti was responsible for one of the reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the one depicting the Battle of Jemappes (one of the French Revolution’s early victories over the Austrians in 1792). The Arc was completed under the July Monarchy (1830-48), which worked hard to appropriate the Napoleonic legacy for its own political purposes. The same regime nearly awarded Marochetti the commission to create Napoleon’s tomb in the Church of the Invalides when his body was repatriated from Saint Helena. The sculptor, in fact, was producing models for this work as he was busy on Glasgow’s Wellington statue (giving the latter a pedigree that surely reinforces Historic Scotland’s mild-mannered point). Yet British towns and cities are also embedded with places that are connected with the French Wars – as barracks, as headquarters, as places of exile and refuge, as naval dockyards, as depots for PoWs, as sites of popular mobilization. Sometimes the associations are long-forgotten, sometimes they are commemorated.  The conflict is remembered in the monuments that ask us not to forget the carnage and in the individuals who are commemorated in stone and bronze. These may, like Glasgow’s Iron Duke, have become so much part of our urban environment that they are almost unnoticed unless they have a cone on their head, but the traces and memory of the French Wars in Britain’s towns and cities… now there’s a project!

Dr Mike Rapport is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789-1799 (OUP, 2000), The Shape of the World: Britain, France and the Struggle for Empire (Atlantic, 2006), 1848, Year of Revolution (Little, Brown, 2008), and The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image credit: Statue of Wellington, mounted. Outside the Gallery of Modern Art, Queen Street, Glasgow, Scotland [Author: Green Lane, Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia Commons]

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Young children take to painting, singing, dancing, storytelling, and role-playing with scarcely any explicit training. They delight in these proto-art behaviors. Grown-ups are no less avid in extending such behaviors, either as spectators or participants.

Provided we have a generous view of art, one that includes appropriate mass, popular, folk, ritual, and domestic practices as well as the esoteric professional art of specialists, we all engage routinely and often passionately with art. Consider, for example, the absorption of teenagers in popular music and the extent to which it contributes to their sense of self-identity. The same continues throughout life. We are interested in TV shows, movies, novels, music, dance, and the plastic arts. In fact, almost everyone has expert knowledge about some genres of art and a broad understanding of others. Many people participate creatively as amateurs both in high art forms and in more quotidian ones, such as potting, making clothes, adorning their environments, and so on. Moreover, the art of skilled professionals often receives sophisticated appreciation involving high levels of cognitive and emotional engagement.

In other words, nothing could be more natural than our attraction to the arts. Indeed, we might suspect that their ancient origins and the universal spread of art behaviors, along with the interest and deep satisfaction to which such behaviors give rise, indicate that they are a touchstone of our biologically-framed and culturally-inflected human nature. Note that the earliest known European cave art dates back more than 35,000 years to a time when the climate was very harsh and life must have been hard; art has been ubiquitous since then or earlier.

"Meercatze" rock carving in Libya. Photo by Luca Galuzzi (www.galuzzi.it), 2007. Creative Commons License.

But now consider these same behaviors from the perspective of the Martian anthropologist. How exotic and bizarre they must appear to be! He puzzles:

They tell or enact stories about people who have never existed and yet, knowing this, they find those stories deeply stimulating and emotionally moving. They find it intriguing to view paintings of bowls of fruit but don’t spend much time gazing at actual fruit bowls. They attach catgut to plywood, scrape it with horsehair, and enjoy the noise, though many other sounds do not appeal to them in a similar way. They amuse themselves by exaggerating their normal form of locomotion by swaying, jumping, spinning, and weaving patterns in groups.

Our sporting practices and spiritual rituals would be similarly perplexing to the alien visitor.

Those of us who share some of the Martian’s amazement are bound to wonder how the arts became so important to us. They permeate our lives and consume our energies, resources, and time. Of course they are often a source of pleasure. (Though recall that we are frequently drawn to tragic dramas and to stories and music that are sad; also that much art is of unrewardingly poor quality.) Yet we may wonder just why they are enjoyed.

One possibility is that art served humans’ evolutionary agendas for reproductive success, because evolution often gets creatures to do what is in their genes’ interests by making the pertinent activities intrinsically pleasurable. Art behaviors might have been directly adaptive; their adoption was responsible for increased reproductive success and the relevant propensities were passed to future generations. For instance, art might have bonded individuals and sustained their values in ways that benefitted their reproductive chances compared to those of art-impoverished people. Alternatively, art behaviors might have been incidental by-products of other adaptive capacities, such as intelligence, curiosity, and creativity. Many such theories have been advanced and there is considerable disagreement about what the arts are alleged to have been adaptations for or about the adaptations to which they are alleged to have stood as by-products. The comparative evaluation of these various, often conflicting, positions is challenging but well deserving of close attention.

And when that is done, it remains to consider if the arts serve similar or related evolutionary functions in our modern context. Perhaps as by-products they went on later to become adaptive in some new way. Perhaps as adaptations their evolutionary advantages came to be negated by changes in the human social and physical environment.

We can say at least this much: even if art behaviors are near-universal when taken together, they are so complex and varied that each individual person expresses them in a subtly distinctive fashion. Some people love novels, others are mainly interested in movies, a person who is insensitive to poetry might be a fine dancer, etc. We can also observe that, unlike other universal behaviors that are mastered relatively cheaply, such as bipedalism, art behaviors involve significant costs and ongoing commitments. These two facts together suggest that these behaviors can serve as informationally rich signals about fitness-relevant characteristics of those who display them. That is sufficient to show an important link between art and evolution.

Stephen Davies is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. He is the author of The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2012) and he blogs at artfulspecies.

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By Geraldine Johnson

When the latest news in the art world is all about record-breaking prices for contemporary works and the celebrity buzz of London’s Frieze Art Fair, thinking about Renaissance art might seem, well, a little old-fashioned, if not downright eccentric. But if the two experiences I had recently are anything to go by, maybe we need to think again.

The first of these occurred during an art history class I was teaching to a group of newly-arrived master’s students fizzing with intellectual energy and excitement. The topic was how the concept of ‘the artist’ had changed in European culture from ancient times to the present day, with an intriguing sideways glance at the situation in pre-Modern China. By the end of the usual give-and-take of a graduate seminar, it had become clear to all of us that there were actually a surprising number of similarities between that first great celebrity artist, the ‘divine’ Michelangelo, and much more recent art world superstars.

As we know all too well from countless biographies, exhibitions, films, and television specials, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rebel-artists seemed to gain critical acclaim in the long run (indeed, often only after they had died) by very overtly rejecting all trappings of worldly success. Think of Gauguin giving up a career as a big-city stockbroker to live in faraway Tahiti or van Gogh being unable to sell almost any paintings during his own lifetime. In contrast, Michelangelo, Dürer, Titian, Bernini, Rubens, and many other Renaissance and Baroque artists were absolutely desperate to become rich, famous, and if at all possible ennobled, and were clearly thrilled at the prospect of hanging out with popes and princes. This, in many ways, seems much closer to the red-carpet appearances, VIP-fraternizing, and multi-millionaire tastes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Grayson Perry than to those old garret-loving, poverty-stricken members of the Modernist avant-garde. The lifestyle choices and self-conscious PR strategies of contemporary celebrity artists may thus have more in common with Michelangelo than with Manet or Matisse than one might at first think.

Another recent event that convinced me that Renaissance art is far from ‘history’ was the phone conversation I had immediately after my class had finished. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal had called to ask me to provide some background information for an article she was writing on changing reactions to nude men versus nude women in art. The catalyst was the opening of a new exhibition in Vienna’s Leopold Museum entitled Nackte Männer or Nude Men, which rather predictably was generating a great deal of controversy even before the first ticket had been sold.

Once again, contemporary art practices could only be fully understood by looking back in time. Initially, one had to turn to the art academies of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that privileged using the nude male model in art education and thus, by definition, made it nearly impossible for respectable young women to be trained in anything other than painting demure still lives and fully-clothed portraits. But ultimately, to find the sources for the almost endless academic studies of nude men—not to mention the four-meter-high photographic installation known as Mr Big currently lounging in front of the Leopold Museum—one had to go back to the future once again in the form of Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, who saw the male rather than the female body as the ideal human form and who themselves looked even further back to the Classical bodies of ancient Roman and Greek sculpure.

Today in Vienna, large red stickers have been hastily pasted onto the exposed genitals of the three naked male athletes whose photograph by French artists Pierre & Gilles is being used on the Nackte Männer’s exhibition posters plastered throughout the city, much to the distress of the more delicate members of the Austrian public. Back in Michelangelo’s day, it was painted loincloths that were retroactively added to cover the bare buttocks (and worse) of the saints and sinners depicted in his Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, with the censorship carried out, in this case, at the behest of incensed clerics convinced that the pope’s chapel was being turned into a brothel. So, what goes around, really does come around, if you know your Renaissance art. And, funnily enough, there are even some ‘old masters’ on display at a spin-off of this year’s Frieze Art Fair.

Geraldine A. Johnson is a University Lecturer in History of Art and Associate Head of the Humanities Division at Oxford University, as well as a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. She is the author of Renaissance Art: A Very Short Introduction, co-editor of Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and editor of Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension. She is currently completing a book on art and the senses in Renaissance Italy.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credits: Ilse Haider, Mr Big [Courtesy of Galerie Steinek, Wien]; Michelangelo, Detail of the Creation of Adam, 1508-12. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City [public domain via Wikimedia Commons]; Michelangelo, Detail of the Last Judgment 1534-41. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City [public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

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• The woes of Lascaux

 

Today marks the 500th anniversary of the dedication of Michelangelo’s magnificent Sistine Ceiling on the vigil of All Saints’ Day (otherwise known as Halloween) in 1512. The anniversary comes at a time of growing debate about whether the Vatican should impose limits on who can enter the chapel and how. While some argue that a visit to the chapel is now an “unimaginable disaster” and “more like a packed, sweaty, and very noisy railway station” than one of the grandest expressions of Christian theology and incomparable masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, Vatican officials, at least for now, promise to keep the chapel open to the tens of thousands of visitors who visit the site each day.

Despite the crowds, seeing the chapel in person is an experience not to be missed. With some perseverance and planning, visitors can tune out the din and take in the sublimely painted Judeo-Christian history from Creation through Second Coming on its ceiling and walls. The patient visitor will be rewarded with a seat on one of the benches that line the walls and dividing screen, known as the cancellata, in the front portion of the chapel. After sliding in to a recently vacated spot, the spectator can use binoculars or a small mirror held to the bridge of the nose to enhance viewing pleasure. As one’s eyes become accustomed to the dimly lit interior, the spectacularly clear colors — revealed after carefully executed cleaning in the latter part of the twentieth century — begin to glow from the vault and walls.

Dedicated on the Feast of the Assumption in 1483 by Pope Sixtus IV, for whom the chapel is named, the Sistine was built to serve as the palace chapel for the popes and continues to be the place where the College of Cardinals meets to select a new pope. The original decoration, painted in fresco by a group of artists from Tuscany led by Pietro Perugino, focuses on the twin biographies of Moses and Jesus. It follows the Roman precedent of pairing Old and New Testament stories on opposite walls of church interiors like the basilicas of Old St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, and Santa Maria Maggiore. In the Sistine, Moses and Jesus complement each other as teachers, lawgivers, and priests, with Moses representing the Era of the Law and Jesus, the Era of Grace. Standing portraits of the first twenty-eight popes appear in fictive niches above the biblical narrative to suggest a continuum of leadership from Moses to Jesus to Peter and his papal successors. (The first four portraits, along with the first two narratives and original altarpiece, were later destroyed when Michelangelo prepared the altar wall to create his Last Judgment.) Inscriptions over each narrative underscore this clear message of papal authority and primacy.

In the early sixteenth century, settling foundations caused cracks to appear in the chapel vault, which had been simply painted with a blue, starry sky in the original project. Uninterested in mere repairs, Pope Julius II, nephew to Sixtus, commissioned Michelangelo to decorate the ceiling. Drawings show that the design evolved from a relatively simple presentation of enthroned apostles to the complex series of narratives and ancestral portraits that now fill the entire vault and the lunettes over the windows and papal portraits. Though completed twenty-nine years after the chapel’s original dedication, Michelangelo’s ceiling provides a suitable introduction to the scenes below, tracing Judeo-Christian history from the Separation of Light and Dark through the Creation and Fall of Man, Flood, and Drunkenness of Noah.

This Halloween is also the anniversary of the dedication by Pope Paul III in 1541 of Michelangelo’s magnificent Last Judgment, which the artist completed at the age of sixty-six. The Last Judgment complements the original wall decoration commissioned by Sixtus and completes the narrative begun on Michelangelo’s ceiling, dedicated twenty-nine years earlier. The subject of the Last Judgment itself also offered the opportunity to manifest specific messages of papal power and primacy, as the imagery reminds all viewers that entry to heaven is regulated through St. Peter and his church.

From the vault to the walls below, the entirety of Christian past and future are displayed and contained within the pope’s chapel. Humanity’s Original Sin, shown at the center of the ceiling in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, leads to all that unfolds on the walls below. The pope and his court, when gathered together in the chapel, sit literally and symbolically at the center of this action. During Mass, the pope would kneel on the large porphyry disk set in the floor at the entrance of the chapel, able to see all of Christian history unfolding on the ceiling and walls above him with Michelangelo’s glorious vision of the Second Coming on the altar wall opposite where he knelt. For visitors, it is a view worth taking before leaving the chapel.

Anne Leader received her Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance Art from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and teaches at the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her research and publications explore a range of topics in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art, architecture, urbanism, and religious tradition, including Michelangelo’s final project for the Sistine chapel. Her first book, The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery, has just been published by the Indiana University Press.

Learn more about Renaissance art, Michelangelo, and the popes mentioned here at at Oxford Art Online, which offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single, elegant gateway users can access—and simultaneously cross-search—an expanding range of Oxford’s acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles available exclusively online.

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Image credit: Sistine Chapel ceiling by Aaron Logan under Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons.

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Happy 81^st Birthday, George Washington Bridge! The French architect Le Corbusier reportedly said you are “the most beautiful bridge in the world” – you “gleam in the sky like a reversed arch.” But are you really a work of art?

"George Washington Bridge. New York City." By Arthur Rothstein, 1941. From the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection at The Library of Congress.

The designer Othmar H. Ammann certainly was conscious of the need to make beautiful bridges. In 1958 he wrote: “Economics and utility are not the engineer’s only concerns. He must temper his practicality with aesthetic sensitivity. His structures should please the eye. In fact, an engineer designing a bridge is justified in making a more expensive design for beauty’s sake alone.”

Apart from its obvious elegance, I think that the George Washington Bridge (GWB) is notable perhaps for four reasons. First, at 3,500 feet it was nearly twice the span of the longest bridge at the time — the Ambassador Bridge at 1,850 feet. Second, Ammann was able to make huge cost savings by reducing the estimates of live load (i.e. due to traffic and trucks etc.) and relying on a relatively new so called ‘deflection theory’ to design the bridge. Third, the bridge was built during the Great Depression, but there wasn’t enough money — a cause of a change in appearance because the now famous steel towers were due to be faced in concrete and stone. Fourth, Ammann designed the bridge so that it could be added to, though that didn’t come about until 1962. With its 14 lanes of traffic it is now one of the busiest bridges in the world.

Given later events such as the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge — the famous ‘galloping Gertie’ which Ammann actually investigated — one could argue that Ammann’s design was ‘brave’. Large changes from what has gone before, as at Tacoma, can be challenging. It is interesting therefore that as a young man Ammann made his name early by writing a report on another famous bridge disaster — the Quebec Bridge that collapsed during construction in 1907. At the time the Quebec Bridge was also to be a very large span at 1800 feet, rivalled only by the Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland with main spans of 1710 feet and built in 1890. Ammann would have seen and learned how the many errors in the design and execution led to the downfall of Quebec. He would have contrasted that experience so strongly with the way Sir Benjamin Baker and Sir John Fowler took meticulous care with the Forth after they had witnessed the collapse of the Tay Bridge in Scotland in 1879. I suspect that he learned much from those experiences.

Suspension bridges are complex because the flow of forces in the structure is not easily calculated; engineers call them statically indeterminate. Only now with large computers can we model their behaviour with any confidence. Ammann was taught in Zurich at ETH by Wilhelm Ritter, the engineer who laid the basis for the new, but still rather approximate, deflection theory in 1877. Indeed Ritter taught arguably two of the greatest bridge designers of the early 20th century, Ammann and Robert Maillart, who was responsible for some beautifully elegant early reinforced concrete bridges in Switzerland including the world famous Salginatobel Bridge near Schiers. Ritter’s influence on two of his most accomplished pupils is clear in their work. Ritter emphasised the importance of visualising the flow of forces in the bridge and its relationship with aesthetics. Josef Melan improved the new deflection theory in 1888 and Leon Moisseiff used it to design the Manhattan Suspension Bridge in 1908. The theory was so-named because it took account of the deflections of the structure under live loads (i.e. the moving traffic, etc.). Moisseiff was confident that the theory was accurate but he later was to design Tacoma Narrows.

Perhaps Ammann was more aware of its limitations than some commentators, such as Henry Petroski, have intimated. He knew that the theory was based on quite severe simplifying assumptions. Darl Rastofer has written that Ammann was a reserved, self-effacing, and meticulous man, but one with a quiet inner confidence that meant he could hold his own. He was as comfortable at dealing with detail as well as taking an overview. Like others before him such as Thomas Telford at Menai Bridge in North Wales, Baker and Fowler at Forth, Ammann used theory. But unlike Theodore Cooper at Quebec and Sir Thomas Bouch at Tay, perhaps he was very careful to check and control the detail. I suspect that he was diligent in making sure he understood the flow of forces even if he knew he couldn’t calculate them precisely. I suspect that is why he went on to be so successful in leaving his mark on New York City with five major bridges that bear so much of the traffic flow to and from the city, and with his help on the high profile Golden Gate in San Francisco.

General view of North Side of Bridge from NJ Side of River. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

So is the GWB a work of art? Art is difficult to define but we can say it is a power of the practical intellect, the ability to make something of more than ordinary significance. Is the GWB an extraordinary bridge? Did Ammann achieve aesthetic sensitivity? He certainly achieved practicality; no-one can fail to be impressed. Le Corbusier liked it, so that is good enough for most of us. But of course Le Corbusier was a modernist, so he liked functionality; for example he saw buildings ‘as machines for living in’. All in all I think it is no accident that suspension bridges are some of the most beautiful structures we see around us. The graceful curves of the cables are the defining feature and they are entirely natural structures. They are the best examples of harmonious form and function. The GWB is one of the best as was Othmar Ammann.

Emeritus Professor David Blockley is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK. He has won several awards including the Telford Gold Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He has written over 160 technical papers and 7 books – the latest of which are Bridges: The Science and Art of the World’s Most Inspiring Structures and Engineering: A Very Short Introduction. Read his previous blog post: “The ingenious problem-solving of the modern-day engineer.”

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To mark the anniversary of a now little-remembered national catastrophe – the nineteenth-century fire which obliterated the UK Houses of Parliament – Oxford University Press and author Caroline Shenton will reconstruct the events of that fateful day and night in a real-time Twitter campaign. Here’s the story so far. Join us tomorrow, 16 October 2012!

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The artist Grayson Perry recently completed a cycle of six giant tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences, inspired by William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. In the Turner Prizewinner’s modern rendition, Tim Rakewell (like his Georgian counterpart Tom Rakewell) undergoes a social transformation from humble origins to landed gentry. In Perry’s version, Tim’s life course is transformed by university education and a self-made fortune in computers – which catapults him socially from his humble origins in a Northern council house, via the bourgeois confines of middle-class dinner tables, to owning his own country estate. Like his eighteenth-century namesake, Tim meets an untimely death — not from syphilis, but through another, more contemporary hazard resulting from a ‘fast’ lifestyle — a crash in his Ferrari. Like Hogarth, Perry ingeniously constructs a modern morality tale that captures the spirit of the age — in Hogarth’s day, advantageous marriage; in our own time, fascination with wealth and celebrity culture. One of the most compelling aspects of both artists’ work is their eye for the design of everyday objects and what they convey about their owners’ lifestyles and identities. From geegaws to grand purchases, fabrics to foodstuffs, the choices we make locate us in modern consumer culture as part of a particular tribe, group or class. Their condition, use and juxtaposition are invested with human drama and emotion. In Hogarth, a wrecked marriage is indicated by an upturned mahogany chair; in Perry, violent death is present in a smashed iPhone.

Through a riveting series of television programmes for Channel 4 about the making of his tapestries, Perry excelled in casting a non-judgmental, even quasi-anthropological eye over the habits of each ‘tribe’ he visited in search of inspiration — from grannies’ front parlours (with their china cabinets and horse brasses) and working men’s clubs in Sunderland, to the game larders of the Cotswold gentry. Among the middle classes he contrasted those he met who were affluent but who had no particular views about taste of their own — who effectively outsourced their consumer decisions to the builders of executive-style homes with luxurious magnolia interiors (ready furnished) — and those for whom ‘cultural capital’ was important. Among a certain section of bourgeois consumers, each Farmers’ Market purchase and shabby-chic item artfully placed at home becomes a marker not only of taste, but of sound morals (supporting local producers, buying Fairtrade products, demonstrating ‘good taste’).  Not so those who inherit wealth in modern Britain — whose loyalty to their tribe is demonstrated by appropriate dress — consisting where possible of hand-me-downs from their great-grandparents, and favouring durability over the whims of shifting fashions. Perry depicts the latter group as a wounded stag with a human face, under threat of extinction from the harsh realities of economic change and onslaught of new money (Tim Rakewell at the gate with his chequebook).

It is a certain type of middle class person who emerges from Perry’s study as the most anxious about taste, probably because of its close association with morality among this particular tribe. ‘Bad’ taste isn’t just about choosing the wrong wallpaper if you believe that it is an expression of your cultural capital and social aspiration: it’s about whether you are a good person and the ‘right kind’ of person.  In this, the twenty-first century bourgeois (southern?) English are the direct inheritors of their Georgian ancestors’ view of taste. For it was only with the rise of modern consumer society that such things came to be of consequence to people beyond the ranks of the gentry and aristocracy, who in previous generations had pretty much preserved their monopoly on consumer choices owing to their stranglehold on wealth and power. Personal preferences came to matter only when markets diversified (more stuff available), specialised (more ingenious stuff available), and produced goods that became more affordable (more cheap stuff). Added to this was better transportation by road, sea and canal — later railways (easier-to-get stuff). Novelty became a major factor in the desirability of consumer goods (exotic stuff).

Through this new world of exciting goods, ordinary people with a little more disposable income to spend (which varied according to other factors, like the price of basic foods), sought guidance on how to acquire and exercise the faculty of taste. Access to books, art, and music was no longer confined to the very wealthy. Certain rules made it easier, provided consumers boned up on where to look and what to buy from an authoritative source, like the vastly popular Spectator, published in the early years of the eighteenth century by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.  As far as music went, for much of the century, Georgian consumers mostly thought that Italian music was good taste, though connoisseurs debated about which composers expressed the finest sentiments. If all else failed, and Italian opera in its earliest imported forms proved a little too florid, Handel reassured the English with royally-approved reworkings, adapted to suit the more austere taste of the Hanoverians.

Unlike Grayson Perry’s findings about contemporary Britain, where the taste of the gentry is defined by inheritance and continuity, the Georgian gentry were much more innovative and experimental, inspired often by their experiences on the Grand Tour. The great era of country house building between 1680 and 1730 brought to the British Isles new architectural styles that are still traceable in the neo-Classical porticos and faux PVC sash windows that adorn modern executive homes. Perry’s insights resist the idea that there is any such thing as bad taste — merely that taste is tribal and profoundly linked to where we come from and whither we aspire. Taste and morals aren’t necessarily linked – but perhaps, in an age of growing awareness about the finitude of global resources, the process of highlighting the political dimensions of consumption isn’t necessarily a bourgeois failing either.

Helen Berry is Professor in Early Modern History at Newcastle University. She is the author of numerous articles on the history of eighteenth-century Britain, and is the author of  The Castrato and His Wife (2011), which is now available in paperback(2012). If you liked this, try Helen Berry’s OUPblog articles on why history says gay people can’t marry and an analysis of Royal weddings.

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Image credit: A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth, in public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Of all decorated Ice Age caves, by far the most famous is that of Lascaux, which was discovered 72 years ago today by four boys (the hole was found by a dog on 8 September 1940, but the boys entered the cave on 12 September). It houses the most spectacular collection of Paleolithic wall-art yet found. It is best known for its 600 magnificent paintings of aurochs (wild cattle), horses, deer, and “signs,” but it also contains almost 1,500 engravings dominated by horses. The decoration is highly complex, with numerous superimpositions, and clearly comprises a number of different episodes. The most famous feature is the great “Hall of the Bulls,” containing several great aurochs bull figures — some are 5 m in length, the biggest figures known in Ice Age art.

Lascaux painting. Photo by Prof saxx, 2006. Creative Commons License. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

After its discovery, Lascaux was rapidly subjected to a number of official atrocities: the widening of its entrance, the removal of its sediment without archaeological supervision, mass visitation, and the installation of an air conditioning system. The cave was closed to tourists in 1963 owing to pollution. A “green sickness” (a proliferation of algae) and a “white sickness” (crystal growth) had been noticed in the 1950s and were worsening. It was possible to reverse the effects of the algae and arrest the development of the crystals; but to ensure the survival of the cave’s art, it was necessary to drastically restrict the number of visitors and to take multiple other precautions. As compensation, a facsimile called Lascaux II was opened nearby in 1983, which permits the public to visit exact replicas of the main painted areas of the cave.

In 1999, a local firm was selected for the task of replacing the aging air conditioning equipment. It appears that they had no previous experience working in caves, and the workmen were left largely unsupervised, did not wear the sterilised footgear, and (it is said) often left the doors open. It is hardly surprising that by 2000 a new biological pollution had appeared in the cave: first a fungus Fusarium solani, characterised by white filaments, then a series of bacteria and fungi. Chemicals, while temporarily effective, could only slow the proliferation of the organisms. In 2002 France’s Ministry of Culture set up a scientific committee to tackle these problems, but very little news of its work ever reached the archaeological community, let alone the general public. The few official pronouncements were consistently optimistic, despite the terrible rumours in archaeological circles about the true state of affairs. It is known that the limitations of the chemical treatments were realized in 2003, and more sediment was removed from the cave to stop the micro-organisms from feeding off them.

What caused this sudden change in the cave? It was obvious to neutral observers that, after 40 years of stability, the shoddy work done in 1999 was to blame. Some claim that the organisms were always lurking, dormant, in the cave, and that this work merely aggravated the situation. Some have even tried to blame global warming. In any case, the responsibility lands solidly at the door of the administrators of the cave. Six different institutions have a hand in running the cave, and there seems to be little coordination.

Thanks in large measure to efforts by the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux (ICPL), led by French campaigner Laurence Léauté-Beasley, the true situation eventually emerged, and cave art specialists were at last able to learn the catastrophic condition of this World Heritage site. Amazingly, the scientific committee appointed by the French government didn’t feature a single rock art or cave art specialist. As the French magazine Paris Match pointed out in a ferocious article (7 May 2008), its director was inexplicably a specialist in Palaeochristian ceramics. Incredibly, the committee ignored the scientists who had cured the cave in the 1960s. It seemed that it was determined to start from scratch, and to treat the problems as if this was a new cave to be studied, playing things by ear as different factors arose. The knowledge and experience gained in the cave in the 1960s were deemed irrelevant.

The French authorities eventually organised a major conference in Paris in February 2009, advertised as a gathering of international scholars who would debate the problems of Lascaux. However, there was widespread shock when the conference programme was made public. It did not include anyone from the team who cured Lascaux in the 1960s, the ICPL, the French scholars who know the art of Lascaux best (Brigitte and Gilles Delluc, and Norbert Aujoulat) or, incredibly, a single cave art specialist. A few of the much-trumpeted international invitees from America, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere were involved in rock art research, but could contribute little to solving the very complex and unique problems of Lascaux. Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that the conference was largely irrelevant, although its deliberations were subsequently published in a lavish volume.

There was, however, one positive development: the original scientific committee was dissolved, replaced by a new one that is (theoretically) to operate independently of the non-scientific management of the cave. This met a key aspiration of the ICPL, since many of the mistakes made are seen as a direct result of managers rather than scientists making decisions about treatments of the cave. The new committee includes Spanish cave art specialists and excellent scientists. A truly independent, international group of scientists, the Lascaux International Scientific Thinktank (LIST) has also been formed, which monitors the deliberations and decisions of the official committee and offers objective information about the cave’s current condition.

Paul G. Bahn is the contributor of the popular Grove Art Online entry on Lascaux, as well as numerous other Grove articles on cave sites in France and Spain. He is the author of Cave Art: A Guide to the Decorated Ice Age Caves of Europe (2nd ed. 2012, Frances Lincoln, London), and Journey Through the Ice Age (1997, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London / University of California Press, Berkeley).

Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single, elegant gateway users can access—and simultaneously cross-search—an expanding range of Oxford’s acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies available exclusively online.

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Robert Hughes was born in Australia in 1938 and lived in Europe and the United States since 1964. He worked in New York as an art critic for Time Magazine for over three decades from 1970 onward. He twice received the Franklin Jeweer Mather Award for Distinguished Criticism from the College Art Association of America. He is the author of numerous books, including Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, which Oxford University Press published in 1993. Publishers Weekly called it a “a withering, salubrious jeremiad.”

Robert Hughes is survived by his wife, two stepsons, brother, sister, and niece.

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Three weeks come and gone, and what do we have to show for it? Not quite 6000 new miles on the odometer. A nice, even tan across parts of my head that, in earlier years, never knew sunlight. Eleven orphaned socks. A fuel pump that wouldn’t survive the Continental Divide. Me, I’m rethinking life on the road.

The idea (my wife’s) was nothing if not efficient: the kids get their Great Western Adventure, I promote my new book, The Day in Its Color, and together we look closely at the changes that have unfolded in an American landscape documented by amateur photographer Charles Cushman, during his travels from 1938 to 1968.

Main Ave., Durango, Colorado, 1965. Charles Cushman Photograph Collection, Indiana University.

Main Ave., Durango, Colorado, 2012. Photo by Eric Sandweiss.

• Family Enrichment: “What’s the Internet password?” is the new “Are we there yet?” The Grand Canyon could be a pretty cool place if they got decent wifi on the North Rim.
• Book Promotion: Selling books is a handcrafted, one-on-one operation — like selling roses on street corners or seeking quarters for a cup of coffee. It promises profits at a similar scale.
• Changes in the Land: The geological epoch of 1938-2012 has brought little change to the countours of mountainsides and valleys. Here in the world of human life-spans, small towns have either decided to attract new business by dressing themselves up to look like small towns or have withered from indifference. Central cities worked better seventy years ago, when there was plenty for bums to do, than today, when there’s not (the bums are still there, in any case, looking for something to do).

Not a bad tally of lessons learned, all in all. But the least expected insight from this multi-purpose trip is perhaps the hardest to swallow. Having traveled about one percent of the distance covered by Cushman and his wife Jean in their decades on the road, I’m already reminded of how much more of their lives yet remains hidden behind the seeming plenitude of his photographs. It’s a long, long day that yields a handful of images. Surrounding the few fractional seconds required for those pictures lie million more uncaptured images of the world that presses in on us hour after hour: pills on the sink; a used towel on the bathroom floor; the gas pump; the wrong turn; unspoken words in an unwinnable argument; the gas pump; the static on the radio; the gas pump. Do we want to remember these images? No. Do they dominate our actual experience? Absolutely.

Charles and Jean Cushman never had audio books, but my family and I allowed ourselves this modern indulgence. One of the titles we chose for the trip was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Thirty-five years after my first encounter with the epic, Kerouac’s prose struck me tiresome, endless — in his own word, “beat.” The narrated book unfolded in our car as if in real time, rarely omitting a bump on the road or a morning coffee break. This was part of the novelist’s point, of course: hold up a mirror to life, capture as spontaneously as possible the fullness (and even weariness) of the long journey without pausing for selection, reflection, interpretation.

Main Ave., Durango, Colorado, 1965. Charles Cushman Photograph Collection, Indiana University

Main Ave., Durango, Colorado, 2012. Photo by Eric Sandweiss.

Finally pulling off the road, I am beginning to appreciate not so much how a prolific artist puts together that world, but the care with which he conceals all that lies behind it. Knowing what to leave out is as exacting and exhausting a skill as deciding what to put in. Charles Cushman — a man of many images and almost no words — has, I believe, left out a great deal. His photographs, for all their color, are all that remains to our imperfect senses of a life as full and as mysterious as any.

Eric Sandweiss is Carmony Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America, co-author of Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco (winner of Western History Association’s Kerr prize for best illustrated book), and author of St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape. Read his previous blog posts “Charles Cushman and the discovery of Old World color,” “Bits and Pieces of the Mother Road,” and “Kodachrome America.”

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24 June 1901

Pablo Picasso gives first exhibition outside Spain

On 24 June 1901, two Spanish artists joined in an exhibition of their works at the Paris gallery of Ambroise Vollard. One of these artists was Francisco Iturrino, who had lived off and on in Paris since 1895 and whom Vollard had mentored. The other was a not-yet-20-year-old named Pablo Picasso, who had been befriended by Iturrino and the gallery owner.

Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris, 1912. The Art Institute of Chicago. Source: Wikipaintings.

Picasso would soon prevent any other critics from making such a claim. The death of his close friend Carles Casagemas later in 1901 led to a deep sadness that helped produce Picasso’s Blue Period, three years marked by brooding canvases and somber tones.

During this time, after traveling back and forth between Spain and Paris, Picasso settled permanently in the French capital. There he befriended avant-garde artists such as Jacob; French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who became a roommate; American writer Gertrude Stein; and Georges Braque.

It was 1907, when he completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Women of Avignon), that Picasso put a truly distinct stamp on his art. While he didn’t show the work publicly, it represented his probing experimentation with form and presentation. Over the next few years, he worked closely with Braque to develop Cubism, revolutionizing art.

Picasso went on to a long and brilliant career, becoming the most renowned and influential painter of the twentieth century. And it all began in that small exhibit in 1901.

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In 1938, Charles Cushman commenced his Kodachrome journey across America. At the same time, architects and city planners began to extend the tools of historic preservation beyond their original applications. From Santa Fe to Charleston, city councils experimented with new powers, daring to extend protections once reserved for isolated battlefields, Great Men’s homes, or government buildings to include entire neighborhoods. They argued that the public benefit derived from preserving architectural character outweighed an individual owner’s rights to do with his property what he wished. Federal relief funds paid architects to measure aging buildings, writers and photographers to survey historic districts, real estate analysts to assess urban housing stock. Suddenly, the inner city seemed an interesting place.

Old Town, Albuquerque, 1963. Source: Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection, Indiana University.

Old Town, Albuquerque, 2012. Photo by Eric Sandweiss.

200 block Main St., Los Angeles, 1952. Source: Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection, Indiana University.

200 block Main St., Los Angeles, 2012. Photo by Eric Sandweiss.

2d and Hill St., Los Angeles, 1952. Source: Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection, Indiana University.

2d and Hill St., Los Angeles, 2012. Photo by Eric Sandweiss.

Telegraph Hill from the Embarcadero. Source: Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection, Indiana University.

Telegraph Hill from the Embarcadero, 2006. Photo by Eric Sandweiss.

Eric Sandweiss is Carmony Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America, co-author of Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco (winner of Western History Association’s Kerr prize for best illustrated book), and author of St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape. Eric’s next and last appearance will be a book talk at Left Bank Books in Saint Louis, MO on June 21 at 7:00 p.m. Read his previous blog posts “Charles Cushman and the discovery of Old World color” and “Bits and Pieces of the Mother Road.”

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Route 66 is more famous and less necessary than ever. Gray-haired couples on motorcycles cruise past its boarded-up motels. Families stop at themed rest areas to eat at picnic stands shaped to resemble the iconic roadside attractions that the decommissioned highway no longer supports. Historic markers draw curious travelers off the interstate and onto meandering two-lane roads that peter out in quiet small-town Main Streets.

John Steinbeck’s 1938 Dust Bowl novel, The Grapes of Wrath, helped to turn this thin strip of graded concrete from a numbered piece of federal property into a character in the American family romance. Just as important to this transformation are the early depictions of the road left by its uncelebrated travelers, including the novelist’s first cousin by marriage, photographer Charles Cushman.

I-44 Conway Welcome Center, Conway, MO. Photos by Eric Sandweiss






From the 1930s through the 1950s, Cushman often traveled back and forth along the same route as the Joads, not in an overladen truck but in shiny late-model Ford coupes. While Steinbeck typed up his impressions along the way, Cushman did his thinking with a camera. He recorded sporadically rather than systematically, offering occasional glimpses rather than a coherent narrative. (For that bigger picture, one has to look at his entire work — three decades of picture-taking carried out across a half-million driving miles).

Cushman never, to my knowledge, climbed atop a Harley. He certainly never sported a gray pony tail, but he was among those (including, eventually, cousin John himself in the late road narrative, Travels with Charley) who saw travel along the US highways as an occasion for pleasure and discovery in its own right. Lacking his cousin’s early passion for social critique, or the artistic sensibility of a Robert Frank (who traveled many of the same routes in the 1950s) Cushman stopped here and there as the mood struck him, much as holiday and leisure travelers have done before and since.

Traveling Cushman’s route west in the past week, I am struck both by how full and how fragmented our view of the American roadscape has become. Route 66 exists so completely in our literary memories, our imaginations, our online search options, that even the faintest of efforts can serve to satisfy the curiosity that took a man of his generation many years to settle. As with every other aspect of our networked world, such access cuts both ways. While access to information democratizes our ability to fashion a coherent picture of the landscape, it furthers the atomization of our social and spatial selves. Locked in our homes, we open Google Maps for a 360-degree view of any square foot of the highway. On our GPS devices and our Mapquest searches, we break down the full experience of travel into a million randomly ranked impressions; “continue west 734.5 miles” takes up less space in our brains than “south 37 feet to unmarked intersection, take a soft right onto eastbound access road.” We know everything and we know nothing about the spaces through which we move.










El Vado Motel, Central Ave. (US Highway 66), Albuquerque, NM. Photos by Eric Sandweiss.







Today’s Route 66 is broken into pieces and symbols, shorn of its practical functions even as it is elevated in its “imageability.” To an extent I have to blame not just Steinbeck but Charles Cushman and the millions like him — men and women who accepted the challenge that car companies, chambers of commerce, and camera manufacturers across America laid before them. “See the USA” and appreciate the road — as I am on my own drive this month — not for what it enables us to accomplish as a society, but for what it allows us to experience as individuals.

Eric Sandweiss is Carmony Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America, co-author of Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco (winner of Western History Association’s Kerr prize for best illustrated book), and author of St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape. Read his previous blog post “Charles Cushman and the discovery of Old World color.”

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Dior, Spring/Summer 97, photograph by Niall McInerney, Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Our love affair with the evening dress began in the early 19th century, when its popularity grew as it became fashionable at formal affairs. Always made out of luxurious fabrics, the design of the dress has changed over the years as fashion styles have progressed. Throughout the Victorian era, floor- and ankle-length dresses remained most admired, with most changes being made to the sleeves and neck lines. In the 1830s, off-the-shoulder dresses dominated; in the 1840s, low-necked designs; and in the 1850s short-sleeved gowns. In the 1860s, dresses were accessorised with long gloves and the 1890s with a long train. The Edwardian era saw the empire silhouette and in the 1920s the flapper style revolutionised the evening dress. However, it wasn’t until the 1930s that the dress was exceptionally modernised and was swept up onto glamorous and innovative fashion scene.

Nina Ricci, Spring/Summer 94, photograph by Niall McInerney, Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

The image on the left is from Nina Ricci’s Spring/Summer 1994 collection. Fabulously feminine and floral patterned. It is embellished with beads, bows and fresh flowers. The style is very different from the Dior dress, with short sleeves and wrap over skirt. The detail on the dress is beautifully delicate, yet elaborate and stunning.

Chanel Couture, Autumn/Winter 96, photograph by Niall McInerney, Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

If you are fascinated by the luxury and creative design of the evening dress and would like to learn more, visit Berg Fashion Library and enjoy reading a free (for a limited time only) article on evening dress.

Hollie Graham is an intern at Berg Publishers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, and you can find their articles online at Berg Fashion Library.

Read previous Berg Fashion blog posts: “Happy Birthday, Christian Lacroix” and “London Fashion Week is fast approaching.”

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May 24, 1883

The Brooklyn Bridge opens

On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opened to great fanfare. With schoolchildren and workers enjoying a rare holiday, thousands flocked from Brooklyn and Manhattan to attend the dedication, led by President Chester Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland. The crowd cheered as Emily Roebling – wife of the chief engineer and an integral figure in its construction — became the first person to cross. That night, fireworks illuminated the sky.

A bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan had long been appealing but faced obstacles. The swift waters of the East River seemed impossible to span. Also, any bridge would have to rise high above the river to allow the tall ships to pass beneath.

Bird's-eye view of the great suspension bridge, connecting the cities of New York and Brooklyn, from New York looking so... (1883). Source: New York Public Library.

In the 1850s, bridge designer John Roebling proposed a design to overcome these problems: build a suspension bridge, with the deck held aloft by cables hung from lofty towers. Not until 1869 did Roebling win approval for the project, however.

Almost immediately, the bridge seemed jinxed. Exploring the site, Roebling suffered a serious foot injury that led to a tetanus infection and his death. But with his son Washington supervising construction, work began.

Source: NYPL Labs Stereogranimator.

By 1877, work on the towers and the cables was complete. Next came the task of building the 1,600-foot-long roadway, the longest suspension span then known. Workers finished that work in 1883, and the celebrating began. As a sign hung in Brooklyn proudly declared, “Babylon had her hanging gardens, Egypt her pyramids, Athens her Acropolis…; so Brooklyn has her Bridge.”

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