Month: February 2018

Calendar: February 16

Year: Day to Day Men: February 16

A Daydream Moment

The sixteenth of February in 1923 marks the opening of the sealed door to the burial chamber of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh, Tutankhamun. During his reign of ten years, Tutankhamun restored the traditional polytheistic form of the ancient Egyptian religion from the religious-political changes enacted by the former pharaoh Akhenaten.

Born in May of 1874, British archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter was from an early age interested in Egyptian artifacts; he would often visit and draw illustrations of specimens in the collection owned by the Amherst family. Impressed by his skills, Lady Amherst made arrangements for seventeen year-old Carter to assist British Egyptologist Percy Newberry in an excavation at Middle Kingdom tombs on the Lower Nile River.

After training under Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Édouard Naville, Carter was appointed in 1899 as Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Based at Luxor, he oversaw excavations at nearby Thebes and supervised American archaeologist Theodore Davis’s systematic exploration of the Valley of the Kings. During his service, Carter improved the protection and accessibility to existing excavations and developed a grid-block system for tomb searching.

In 1907, Carter began his employment with George Edward Herbert, 5th Lord of Carnarvon, a financial backer for Egyptian antiquities research. Lord Carnarvon received in 1914 the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Carter led a systematic search for any tombs that were missed in previous expeditions, including that of Tutankhamun. The search was halted during the years of the First World War and resumed in 1917. After five years with no major finds, Carnarvon became dissatisfied with the project; howver, after a discussion with Carter, he agreed to fund one more season of work in the Valley of the Kings. 

On the fourth of November in 1922, a water boy discovered a buried flight of stairs cut into the bedrock. After partially digging out the steps, a mud-plastered doorway was found stamped with indistinct cartouches. Howard Carter had the staircase refilled and notified Lord Carnarvon of the find by telegram. On November twenty-third, Carnarvon arrived accompanied by his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert. The full extent of the stairway was cleared on the next day; it revealed Tutankhamun’s cartouche on the outer doorway. The doorway was removed and the corridor behind it was cleared of rubble.

With Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Carter’s assistant Arthur Callender present, Howard Carter opened a tiny breach in the door of the tomb and was able to see the many gold and ebony treasures within. Carter had in fact discovered the burial tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The site was secured until the morning of the twenty-seventh of November, at which time the tomb was officially opened in the presence of a member of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was virtually intact with all its furnishings and shrines, in spite of previous ancient break-ins. Two life-sized statues of Tutankhamun guarded the sealed doorway to the inner burial chamber. Assisted by staff members of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art which included archeologist Arthur Mace and photographer Harry Burton, Howard Carter over the next several months catalogued and preserved the contents of the chambers. 

On the sixteenth of February in 1923, Howard Carter opened the sealed inner doorway and confirmed it led to a burial chamber that contained the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. His tomb was considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter’s meticulous assessing and cataloguing the thousands of objects in the tomb took nearly ten years; the final work was completed in February of 1932.

Despite the significance of the find, Howard Carter received no honors from the British government. In 1926, he received the Order of the Nile, third class, from Egypt’s King Fuad I. Carter was also award an honorary Doctor of Science from Yale University and a honorary membership in Madrid’s Real Academia de la Historia.

Tutankhamun’s Burial Dagger

Tutankhamun’s Burial Dagger, Blade Composit of Nickel and Cobalt, Egyptian 18th Dynasty

A team of researchers have confirmed that the iron in one of the daggers found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, as well as a number of other precious artifacts from Ancient Egypt, have celestial origins as they were made from meteorites. The research was undertaken by an international team of scientists from the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin, the University of Pisa, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the CNR, the University Fayoum, and the XGlab company. Archeologists had suspected for many decades that the iron used during the reign of the New Kingdom Dynasties and earlier, could come from meteorites.

The composition of iron used in Tutankhamun’s dagger, is nickel and cobalt, which is commonly found in meteorites. In addition, the study of the iron beads from Gerzeh, which are c. 5,000 years old, confirmed that in the times of the eighteenth dynasty, ancient Egyptians were advanced in working iron and that the iron used to create them comes from meteorite.  Previously, it had been believed that the Egyptian Iron Age started after 600 BC.

Calendar: February 15

Year: Day to Day Men: February 15

The Edge of the Known World

The fifteenth of February in the year 1472 marks the birth date of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici, who was the eldest son of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Clarice Orsini, a daughter from the noble Roman house of Orsini. Piero was the lord of Florence from 1492 until his exile in 1494.

Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici was raised alongside his younger brother Giovanni, who would later be installed as Pope Leo X, and his cousin Giulio who later became Pope Clement VII. As the eldest son, he was educated to succeed his father as the head of the Medici dynasty. Piero studied under classical scholar and poet Angelo Poliziano and Catholic priest Marsillo Ficino, the head of the newly restored Florence Academy. 

Piero de’ Medici was arrogant, disruptive and had an undisciplined character. He was constantly at odds with his older and richer cousins Lorenzo and Giovanni, the two sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. Piero was also a suspect in his teacher Angelo Poliziano’s death by poisoning in September of 1494. .

In 1486, Piero’s uncle Bernardo Rucellai, a member of Florence’s social and political elite, arranged a political marriage between Piero and Tuscan noblewoman Alfonsina Orsini. The marriage took place with Rucellai standing as proxy for the groom; Piero finally met Alfonsina in 1488. Their union produce three children: two daughters Luisa and Clarice, and a son named Lorenzo who later became the Duke of Urbino. Baptism records show that Piero had a third daughter named Maria in February of 1492.

Upon the death of his father Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492, Piero de’ Medici became the leader of Florence. The peaceful existence between the Italian states, established by his father, collapsed in 1494 with King Charles VIII of France’s decision to assert hereditary claims to the Kingdom of Naples. After settling issues with the city-state of Milan, King Charles VIII sent envoys to Florence to ask for support for his claims. After five days, Piero de’ Medici responded that Florence would remain neutral, an answer that was unacceptable to King Charles who subsequently threatened Florence. 

Piero attempted to form a resistance but received little support from the Florentine elite who had fallen under the influence of the fanatical Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola. Piero’s own cousins allied themselves with both pledges and funds to King Charles VIII. At the end of October in 1494, Piero, without consulting the governing Signoria of Florence, visited King Charles at his camp and acceded to all of the king’s demands by surrendering the cities of Pisa and Lvorno as well as four fortresses in the area. 

Upon his return to Florence to report his actions to its Signoria, Piero de’ Medici encountered strong public outrage. King Charles VIII, following his conquest of the Kingdom of Naples, made his entrance as ruler into Florence on the seventeenth of November. Because of his isolation and lack of allies, Piero de’ Medici had not sent an army to stop the invasion, thus fuelling the resentment of the Florentine people who finally forced him and his family into exile. Their palazzo was looted, and the Republic of Florence was re-established.

Piero and his family fled to Venice with the aid of French diplomat Philippe de Commines, a servant of King Charles VIII. They supported themselves by the sale of the Medici jewels. Piero tried several times to reinstate himself in Florence but he was rejected. After the French lost the Battle of Garigliano, Piero de’ Medici drowned in the Garigliano River on the twenty-eight of December in 1503 while attempting to flee the battlefield. He was buried in the Abbey of Monte Cassino.

A member of the Medici family would not rule Florence again until 1512, when Giovanni de’ Medici forced the city to surrender. In the next year, he was elected Pope Leo X which solidified the Medici’s power. 

Hendrik Goltzius

Hendrik Goltzius, “Alexander and Bucephalus (Quirinal)”,  1590-1591, Red Chalk on Paper, Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands

Hendrik Goltzius made a long-awated journey to italy in 1590 when he was in his early thirties and already an established significant Dutch artist. He wanted to create a series of engravings of classical works like his Farnese Hercules. This is one of his original Roman drawings for the engravings that were acquired by Queen Christiana of Sweden and given later to the Teylers Museum in Haarlem.

Bucephalus, (ox-head in Greek), was Alexander the Great’s massive horse, one of the most famous horses in antiquity. The horse died from fatal injuries at the Battle of the Hydaspes in June 326 BCC in which Alexander’s army defeated King Porus of the now Punjab region of India.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel de Oude (Peter Bruegel the Elder), “De Bruiloftsdans (The Wedding Dance)”, 1566, Oil on Canvas, Detroit Institute of Art

Pieter Bruegel was the significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a printmaker form Brabant, and know for his landscapes and peasant scenes. He was a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting and one of the first generation of artists to grow up when religious subjects ceased to be the natural subject matter of painting. He only lived until his mid-40′s with all of his famous paintings coming within his last decade when he concentrated only on painting.

The Wedding Dance is a splendid example of Bruegel’s fascination with the peasant life of his native land. Public and private holidays and festivals provided him with typical situations and characters for his paintings. Here the wedding guests are very simply modeled, the positions of their arms and legs somewhat exaggerated to make the dancers look more awkward and more rustic.

Although a modern audience might see this panel primarily as a genre painting, Bruegel’s contemporaries would have noted its moralizing overtones: frenzied dance and lustful behavior could lead to sin and damnation.

Calender: February 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of February

Sports Attire

On February 14, 1931, the film “Dracula” directed by Tod Browning is released throughout the United States.

“Dracula”, starring Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, was produced by Universal Studios and is based on the 1924 stage play “Dracula” written by Hamilton Deane and John L Balderston. The play was based loosely on the novel by Bram Stoker.

Bram Stoker’s novel had already been filmed without permission as “Nosferatu” in 1922 by the German expressionist film maker F.W. Murnau. Bram Stoker’s widow sued for plagiarism and copyright infringement, and the courts decided in her favor, essentially ordering that all prints of “Nosferatu”  be destroyed. Enthusiastic young Hollywood producer Carl Laemmie, Jr. also saw the box office potential in Stoker’s gothic chiller, and he legally acquired the novel’s film rights.

Decision on casting the title role proved problematic. Initially, Laemmle was not at all interested in Lugosi, in spite of good reviews for his stage portrayal. Lugosi had played the role on Broadway, and to his good fortune, happened to be in Los Angeles with a touring company of the play when the film was being cast. Against the tide of studio opinion, Lugosi lobbied hard and ultimately won the executives over, thanks in part to him accepting a paltry $500 per week salary for seven weeks of work.

Due to the limitations of adding a musical score to a film’s soundtrack during 1930 and 1931, no score had ever been composed specifically for the film. The music heard during the opening credits, an excerpt from Act II of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, was re-used in 1932 for another Universal horror film, “The Mummy”. During the theatre scene where Dracula meets Dr. Seward, Harker, Mina and Lucy, the end of the overture to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Numberg can also be heard.

Today, “Dracula” is widely regarded as a classic of the era and of its genre. In 2000, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. It was ranked 79th on Bravo’s countdown of The 100 Scariest Movie Moments. To many film lovers and critics alike, Lugosi’s portrayal is widely regarded as the definitive Dracula.