La Disputa

In honor of the new Indiana Jones movie – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – I thought it might be interesting to post about crystal skulls. Somehow, I doubt I’m the only one who thought, “Wow, 30 years of anticipation, and they come up with alien crystal skulls? Did the Even Stevens kid write the script?” But, as it turns out, crystal skulls are actually real. Sort of.

Few renowned museums have such skulls. The British Museum has one, so does the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. The rest of the 13 skulls are owned by private collectors. It is believed that some of the skulls may have powers or curses. The Mitchell-Hedges skull, aka the “skull of doom” was supposedly used by the Mayans 3,600 years ago to curse enemies.

Even so, no one is quite sure where the skulls come from – though theories on locale included ancient Mesoamerica, Atlantis, and alien worlds. But it’s been looking more and more that they were probably made by this guy.

Meet Eugène Boban, official archaeologist and seller of fake antiquities.

After scientists would study a skull, and conclude its inauthenticity, they would then trace its provenance to discover that Eugène Boban had owned and/or sold it. It seems to me that they’re doing their research backwards. They should have just started with the provenance.

Probably the most fun part of art for me is recognizing the people in the paintings/sculptures/any medium. In the past, when art used to be commissioned by either the wealthy patrons of self-portraiture or scenes from the Bible, characters were generally easy to recognize by their symbols. Some characters are popular and become identifiable by individual characteristics. For instance, St. Jerome is never seen without a lion by him, usually sleeping to demonstrate domesticity. St. Sebastian (here painted by Andrea Mantegna) who is less fortunate, is always pictured pierced by many arrows and tied to a tree (though historically, he survived this first chance of martyrdom, and was killed much later when beaten by club and thrown into a Roman version of a toilet).

Some characters are easy to spot by their place in the frame – Madonna and Child would always be in the middle. Others need a calling card. St. Lucy, a patron saint against blindness, is best known for carrying a dish that holds her own eyes. This particular version has Lucy holding her eyes on some sort of stalk.

If you know of any good or weird saints, definitely comment!

I should probably define a few of the terms that I use while writing this Web log. Restoration, the subject of entries past and future (just warning you now), is the process of making the artwork look the way it did originally. Or as Wikipedia puts it – a little more harshly but perhaps closer to the truth, “Restoration is a process that attempts to return the work of art to some previous state that restorer imagines to be ‘original’”. Restoration can cause controversy, since it usually involves making an irreversible change that could alter the way the artwork was intended to look or even the message it was intended to convey. The purpose of restoration is to make the work look like it did when it was first created. This is a problem with many of the older works, since it is difficult to ascertain what the work looked like – the artists are (generally) dead, the provenance scant, missing or misleading, and the texts (first person accounts, scholarly studies, etc.) tend to be subjected to interpretation.

Restoration is different from conservation, which just involves the preservation of the work rather than any kind of change or return. The main goal of conservation is to make sure that work is in survivable condition.

Within the world of museums, however, these words are sometimes used interchangeably, creating some confusion. For example, the job title of the person who oversees restoration at a museum/gallery is Head Conservator.

Provenance is another term that is significant to the world of art, though it gets ignored on many occasions. Provenance is just a record of origin, or a sort of map if the object moves. An original document, usually a transaction or receipt upon collecting on a commission is a good beginning. So if Duke Sforza commissions Leonardo da Vinci to paint The Last Supper for the Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, upon the completion of the work, there will be a document stating that this happened and LdV got his check. This is a good provenance (assuming no one forged it). Later, if the work gets moved, there should be documentation; if someone sees it and writes a first person view, that’s perfect; and so forth. It is important to always be on the lookout for shady or scant provenances, because dishonest deals can and do happen.

As I think of more terms, I’ll add them to the blog continually.