By Sylvia Poggioli
npr

For close to 400 years, the painting was closed off to the world. For the past 124 years, millions of visitors walked by without noticing an intriguing scene covered with centuries of grime.

Only now, the Vatican says a detail in a newly cleaned 15th century fresco shows what may be one of the first European depictions of Native Americans.

The fresco, The Resurrection, was painted by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio in 1494 — just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in what came to be called the New World.

Antonio Paolucci, director of the Vatican Museums, told the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano that after the soot and grime were removed, in the background, just above the open coffin from where Christ has risen, “we see nude men, decorated with feathered headdresses who appear to be dancing.” One of them seems to sport a Mohican cut.

The image dovetails with Columbus’ description of having been greeted by dancing nude men painted black or red.

Commissioned By The Pope

The painting was commissioned by Pope Alexander VI. Anyone who has followed the TV seriesThe Borgias knows he was the infamous Rodrigo Borgia, a Spaniard who fathered several children and became a symbol of church corruption.

Alexander VI became pope in 1492, only a few months before Columbus made landfall.

Art historian Paolucci is convinced the entire Pinturicchio fresco cycle for the Borgia Apartments inside the Vatican had been completed by the end of 1494.

“The Borgia pope was interested in the New World, as were the great chancelleries of Europe,” Paolucci told L’Osservatore Romano.

Columbus’ four trips to the New World were financed by the Spanish royals Ferdinand and Isabella.

On his return to Spain in March 1493 from his first journey, Columbus handed over his travel journal to the sovereigns who, according to Paolucci, had every interest in keeping it secret.

A Secret That Spread Quickly

But word of Columbus’ sensational discovery soon spread throughout Europe.

“It is hard to believe,” Paolucci said, “that the Borgia papal court would be unaware of what Columbus saw when he reached the ends of the earth.”

Hence, the art historian believes, the dancing figures in Pinturicchio’s Resurrection could be “the first depiction of Native Americans.”

The Borgia pope’s links to the New World do not end there.

Alexander VI played a key role in determining how history would play out in what would become The Americas and who would reap the benefits: While Pinturicchio was painting his cycle, Alexander was busy drafting the Tordesillas treaty of June 1494 that divided up the newly discovered territories between the two major naval powers of the time, Spain and Portugal.

One can’t help but imagine Alexander pondering the implications of Columbus’ discovery while Pinturicchio was concentrating on his brush strokes on the fresh plaster of the Vatican walls.

Pope Alexander has a prominent position in the painting — he’s the large figure in ornate robes kneeling on the left, his hands clasped in prayer.

But it’s not clear whether he’s more transfixed by the image of the risen Christ or by the potential spoils of the New World, represented by the nude dancing figures.

Until now, it was believed that the first known European depictions of Native Americans were those of the British artist John White, who was governor of the colony at Roanoke Island.

But he wasn’t even born until nearly half a century after the discovery of the New World.

Pinturicchio’s nude figures remained forgotten because the Borgia Apartments were sealed off after Pope Alexander’s death in 1503. His successor, Julius II, said he would never live in the rooms of the pope who had so tainted the church’s reputation. And Julius ordered that all paintings made for the Borgias be covered in black crepe.

It was not until 1889 that the Borgia Apartments were reopened and dedicated to the display of religious art.

By Esther Inglis-Arkell
io9

Original Greek statues were brightly painted, but after thousands of years, those paints have worn away. Find out how shining a light on the statues can be all that’s required to see them as they were thousands of years ago.

Although it seems impossible to think that anything could be left to discover after thousands of years of wind, sun, sand, and art students, finding the long lost patterns on a piece of ancient Greek sculpture can be as easy as shining a lamp on it. A technique called ‘raking light’ has been used to analyze art for a long time. A lamp is positioned carefully enough that the path of the light is almost parallel to the surface of the object. When used on paintings, this makes brushstrokes, grit, and dust obvious. On statues, the effect is more subtle. Brush-strokes are impossible to see, but because different paints wear off at different rates, the stone is raised in some places – protected from erosion by its cap of paint – and lowered in others. Elaborate patterns become visible.

Ultraviolet is also used to discern patterns. UV light makes many organic compounds fluoresce. Art dealers use UV lights to check if art has been touched up, since older paints have a lot of organic compounds and modern paints have relatively little. On ancient Greek statues, tiny fragments of pigment still left on the surface glow bright, illuminating more detailed patterns.

Once the pattern is mapped, there is still the problem of figuring out which paint colors to use. A series of dark blues will create a very different effect than gold and pink. Even if enough pigment is left over so that the naked eye can make out a color, a few thousand years can really change a statue’s complexion. There’s no reason to think that color seen today would be anything like the hues the statues were originally painted.

There is a way around this dilemma. The colors may fade over time, but the original materials – plant and animal-derived pigments, crushed stones or shells – still look the same today as they did thousands of years ago. This can also be discovered using light.

Infrared and X-ray spectroscopy can help researchers understand what the paints are made of, and how they looked all that time ago. Spectroscopy relies on the fact that atoms are picky when it comes to what kind of incoming energy they absorb. Certain materials will only accept certain wavelengths of light. Everything else they reflect. Spectroscopes send out a variety of wavelengths, like scouts into a foreign land. Inevitably, a few of these scouts do not come back. By noting which wavelengths are absorbed, scientists can determine what materials the substance is made of. Infrared helps determine organic compounds. X-rays, because of their higher energy level, don’t stop for anything less than the heavier elements, like rocks and minerals. Together, researchers can determine approximately what color a millennia-old statue was painted.

The color? Always something tacky.

By Sam Leith
guardian

It’s wonderful stuff, swearing. It stiffens the sinews and summons up the blood, and not just metaphorically. Obscenities actually do act on us physiologically. Swearing increases electrical conductance across the skin, pushes the heart rate higher and measurably increases resistance to pain.

Obscenities are also linguistically interesting in themselves: the more currency they have, the more their emotional colouring and the associations they trigger overwhelms what they actually mean. “Fucking”, these days, only rarely means “having sex”. And they become marvellously plastic, grammatically.

Swearing doesn’t just mean what we now understand by “dirty words”. It is entwined, in social and linguistic history, with the other sort of swearing: vows and oaths. Consider for a moment the origins of almost any word we have for bad language – “profanity”, “curses”, “oaths” and “swearing” itself .

Melissa Mohr’s title, then, is more than just an attention-grabber: the history of swearing is one of a movement back and forth between the holy and the shit. At different times in the history of the west, the primary taboo has been to do either with God, or with the functions of the human body. (The latter, though, does subdivide in a meaningful way between the sexual and the excremental. Really, this book should have been called “Holy Fucking Shit”.)

Though Mohr is mainly interested in English, she is generous in roping in examples from outside it. A helpful and interesting chapter on ancient Roman filth does much to sketch the background, too. How do we know what was obscene in a dead language? By literary genre, essentially: if it was written on the toilet wall but didn’t appear in satire, it was likely to be properly rude. English has a “Big Six”: “cunt”, “fuck”, “cock”, “arse”, “shit” and “piss” (though Mohr plausibly suggests that “nigger” should now be in there). The Romans had a “Big 10”: cunnus (cunt), futuo (fuck), mentula (cock), verpa (erect or circumcised cock), landica (clitoris), culus (arse), pedico (bugger), caco (shit), fello (fellate) and irrumo (er, mouth-rape).

So the Romans, like us, had a primary relationship between the body and the idea of obscenity – though their sexual schema was a little different, with shame attaching, above all, to sexual passivity. Sexual obscenity also, to complicate things, had a sacramental function – as witness the fruity ways of the god Priapus. Some of that shit was holy.

In medieval times, though, the emphasis was all on the holy. Common words for places and things contained vulgarities regarded as quite innocuous. London and Oxford both boasted a “Gropecuntelane”, which is where the prostitutes hung out, and if you visited a country pond “there would’ve been a shiterow in there fishing, a windfucker flying above, arse-smart and cuntehoare hugging the edges of the pond, and pissabed amongst the grass”. At the same time it’s hard to recapture quite how shocking medieval people would find a vain oath.

Christianity was founded on oaths and covenants – as was the whole dispensation of feudal society. To swear an oath was to compel God to pay attention to your promise – and to do so in vain was to dishonour God and risk eternal damnation. Indeed, it was believed that if you swore on God’s body – “‘sblood!”; “God’s bones!”; “by Christ’s nails!” – you physically spilled his blood, broke his bones and tore out his nails in heaven.

Mohr credits the decline in the importance of oath-swearing to the rise of the merchant classes. Feudal society’s scheme of estates was bound by chains of oaths between lords and vassals, right up to the king. Capitalism moved us from oaths to contracts: the oath before God became less important than keeping your word to business partners – and you didn’t need eschatological terror to enforce that. Plus, there’s the dry, old complaint that swearing constantly “devalues the currency”. Between 1640 and 1660, around the civil war, men might have to swear as many as 10 conflicting oaths of loyalty if they wanted to keep their heads attached to their necks.

At the same time, something else was going on: the idea of privacy. In an age when everybody pissed and shat in public, and sex would as like as not take place in a room or even a bed shared with others, taboos around bodily functions weren’t all that strong. Chaucer‘s “swiving“, “toords“, “queyntes” and “erses” were vulgar and direct, but they weren’t obscene. One word was regarded in the late-18th and 19th centuries as so shocking that it was variously rendered “inexpressibles“, “indescribables“, “etceteras“, “unmentionables“, “ineffables“, “indispensables“, “innominables” “inexplicables” and “continuations“. That word? “Trousers.”

How things change. By the first world war, soldiers swore so much that the word “fucking” came to function as no more than “a warning that a noun is coming”. Now even the extremest obscenities have lost their power to shock. In Irvine Welsh‘s novels, for instance, “cunt” is more or less a synonym for “bloke”. It is telling that, where for the Romans the genitals were veretrum or verecundum (“parts of awe” or “parts of shame”), “in today’s American slang, the genitalia are devalued as ‘junk'”.

The only actually taboo language is that of racial insult. Words like “wop”, “kike” and “yid” (though not, interestingly, “nigger”) were intended to give offence from the off – but only to those on the receiving end. As Mohr writes, the idea that everybody should find them offensive is a relative innovation. Not, it should be said, a bad one.

Mohr’s scholarship seems to be sound and her approach positively twinkles with pleasure and amusement. She gives her chapters headings such as “Shit, That Bloody Bugger Turned Out To Be A Fucking Nackle-Ass Cocksucker!”, and she’s not above finding it funny that a paper on urinary incontinence was co-authored by Splatt and Weedon.

I’d like Mohr’s account to have tipped a wink to Viz comic’s monumental and still-growing Profanisaurus. Her argument might have been strengthened, too, by reminding us that Eric Cartman, in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, saves the world from Satan and Saddam Hussein with the words: “Fuck, shit, cock, ass, titties, boner, bitch, muff, pussy, cunt, butthole, Barbra Streisand!”

But here I pick nits. This is a cracking fucking book, and innominables to anyone who says otherwise.

By Caroline Weber
nytimes
May 8, 2013

To resume my discussion [which Sineokov didn’t post] of the French literary references upon which so much of the humor in the Recherche depends, I wanted to provide an example from “The Guermantes Way” (1920), the volume in which the upper-middle-class narrator makes his first foray into Parisian high society. As Anka Muhlstein pointed out in her splendid post yesterday, the members of the aristocratic Guermantes clan “are convinced that they are still at the apex of [that] society,” and Proust has great fun showcasing their petty vanities and elitist pretensions.

In one such instance, he describes the long-standing antipathy between the family’s two branches — the Guermantes proper, for the most part based in Paris, and their largely provincial Courvoisier cousins — and again uses a well-known (to French readers) literary allusion for laughs. The Courvoisiers, he observes, are at once appalled and intimidated by their Guermantes relations’ self-proclaimed intellectualism and unrivaled chic; they cannot forgive their cousins for preferring to hobnob with members of Paris’s flashy, socially questionable “smart” (in both senses of the term) set, whereas the stodgy Courvoisiers feel infinitely more at home socializing with fellow countrified nobles whose background (“who their ‘father and mother’ were”) is no mystery, even if their company is no fun. And so, while the Courvoisiers can’t resist attending their glamorous kinsmen’s social gatherings, in so doing they manifest a mixture of righteous indignation and poorly disguised envy that the narrator, spotting the charmless Courvoisier matron Mme de Villebon in the drawing-room of the supremely (and, to said matron, infuriatingly) elegant Duchesse de Guermantes, clinches by way of an unexpected Victor Hugo quotation:

To encounter in their cousin’s drawing-room, between five and six o’clock, people with whose relatives their own relatives did not like to associate back home in the Perche became for [the Courvoisiers] a source of mounting rage and inexhaustible denunciations. For example, the moment that the charming Comtesse G*** entered the salon, Mme de Villebon’s face assumed exactly the expression it ought to have had if she had been called upon to recite the line

And if only one of us remains, that one will be I [Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là],

a line that happened to be unknown to her, anyway.

For my money, this is one of the funniest passages in the Recherche, but in translation it falls flat for a few reasons, all related to the line of poetry at the end. First, because non-French readers are almost sure not to know that line themselves — from Hugo’s “Les Châtiments” [“Castigations”] (1853), an extended indictment in verse of Emperor Napoleon III’s overthrow of the French republican government in 1851 — they are unlikely to snicker at Mme de Villebon for sharing in their ignorance. They are also unlikely to grasp the sheer over-the-top weirdness of the parallel the narrator draws (a) between a supercilious killjoy from the Perche (a tiny agricultural region best known for its purebred draft-horses) and the man revered in Proust’s day as France’s greatest poet; not to mention (b) between Mme de Villebon’s petty social hostility toward “the charming Comtesse G***” and Hugo’s lofty, principled outrage at Napoleon III’s coup d’état. (In the poem Proust cites, Hugo is directly addressing the emperor, whose coup sent the staunchly republican poet into exile, and declaring that he will defy Bonapartist authority to the end, even if he proves “the last man standing.”)

Finally, no English translation can capture the intensely stylized, emphatically sonorous grandeur of Hugo’s alexandrine: the twelve-syllable metric form that is to French classical poetry and drama what iambic pentameter is to English verse. To the French ear, nothing says “hero” quite like an alexandrine, and the line Proust quotes here, comprised of four perfect anapests (poetic “feet” in which two unstressed syllables are followed by a stressed one, as in Lord Byron’s similarly rousing “Destruction of Sennacherib” [1815]: “and the sheen of theirspears was like stars on the sea”), is a particularly resonant case in point. And yet there is obviously nothing in the least bit heroic about Mme de Villebon’s prickly pique when confronted with a “charming” Parisian socialite, nor about her self-important resolve to remain “the last man standing” in her fashionable cousin’s salon. By pairing her with Hugo, Proust thus achieves much the same effect he creates with the Françoise/Saint-Simon juxtaposition I discussed yesterday. He gives us a complex, superbly comical portrait of an individual whose all-too-human quirks are best sought and found [recherché and retrouvé] where all Proustian treasures ultimately turn out to reside: in literature.

Ms. Weber is currently at work on a book titled “Proust’s Duchess: In Search of the Exquisite in Belle Époque Paris,” to be published by Knopf in 2014.

By Adam Gopnik
nytimes
May 8, 2013

I suppose that by now to announce that I first read Proust with the woman now my wife — or the man now my husband, or the woman now my partner, or however it might work out — is to participate in a cliché, touched by a not-entirely-appealing local color. Only in America has the experience of Proust become a ritual of courtship. But, as it happened, I did.

The girl I was in love with in college and I went out and, in a second-hand bookstore in Montreal, bought the old Random House two-volume version of the Moncrieff translation. What surprised me in that first reading, up on Mount Royal, was not how impressed I was by Proust’s command, the beauty of his sentences and the confidence of his psychological generalizations. It was, rather, that, expecting a profound but slightly forbidding, even “estranging,” literary tour de force, on the order of “Ulysses” or “Paradise Lost” — a text like a mountain to be scaled, with the reader arriving at last wearily at the top, panting for oxygen with a Sherpa-like companion; glad to have made the ascent and yet haunted by the frozen bodies seen fallen short of the summit, those who never made it past “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” — given that expectation, I was shocked by how much I liked Marcel, to give the narrator the name he only once gives himself.

We are taught sternly to announce, and tumidly to lecture our creative writing students, that our favorite characters need not be our favorite people. Good characters, from Becky Sharp to Satan in Milton, can be rotten to the core and still delicious to the bite. But, at the risk of letting the waistband of my bourgeois boxers show too largely above my borrowed modernist pants, I do think that narrators need to win us if they are to hold us. Nick Carraway, Huck Finn, and even poor Charles Ryder — the truth is that just as heroes are better when they are heroic, narrators in long tales are best when we are charmed by their company and are given reasons to trust their sensations. Narrators need not be likeable, in the sense of touched by moral rectitude, but it does seem necessary in any successful full-length tale for the narrator to be lovable — exactly as, say, Humbert Humbert in “Lolita” is lovable, in his own horrible way.

Well, the narrator in Proust — let us defy academic fastidiousness and call him Marcel — struck me then, and strikes me still, as the most high-hearted, self-deprecating, joyously observant, tender, frequently funny, always attentive voice I had encountered in literature. (Far more, doubtless, than Proust would have been himself.) Frankly neurotic in his anxieties, the narrator’s neurosis on the page registers above all as sensitivity, mindfulness. His wide-eyed appreciations illuminate those first volumes with affection: appreciations of his aunt Léonie, of Françoise, the cook, of his Madame Sévigné-loving grandmother, above all of his well-meaning father and loving mother. Even the secondary characters, satiric targets, are on the whole treated with a malice rendered affectionate by understanding: Madame Verdurin is chiefly silly, not wicked; in over her social head.

And are there, in the old-fashioned sense, more admirable characters in literature than Saint-Loup, the aristocrat trying to struggle out of the limitations of his inherited world view without sacrificing its elegance — or, above all, than Swann, whose tragedy in love does not diminish our admiration for his tact, his delicacy, his essential kindness, and his readiness to make himself look shallow in order to avoid betraying a friend? The book is, among other things, a manifesto against malicious speech, and Swann moves us because he understands that true aristocracy lies in a readiness to refrain from malice, even at the price of having others think him simple.

And then there is, well, so much pure Charlie Brown in the narrator’s voice: his worrying desperately in front of the pillar with the poster of Berma’s next appearance about how he will feel when he actually sees her act; his anxieties about Gilberte — the original Little Red-Haired Girl — and her possible presence in the playground on the Champs-Élysées. That he buys his cravat intending to impress her at Charvet rather than at Sears does not diminish the universality of his unrequited ardor.

My first sense, confirmed by two subsequent readings (one, in French, that did indeed have some of the exhausting aspects of an Everest expedition) is that the philosophical and psychological theories registered in the book are the least interesting thing about it, and the charm and humor and social observation evident on every page, the most. Yes, indeed, Proust’s conclusions about human love are sadly persuasive: We invent the people we love as much as we experience them; our infatuations, even those that shape our lives, are our own inventions. And he’s right to advance nostalgia as an organizing principle: we agree with him that time is the first principle of life, devouring our experience, in all its intensity and heartbreak, and leaving us wondering, aghast, not just where life has passed but where the world has gone.

But it’s not the profundity of these ideas that matters. It’s the joy of their enactment, which cuts the edge of Proust’s official pessimism on every page. Joyce, in “Finnegan’s Wake,” another expedition That Woman and I attempted, ends by asserting simply that there is a mountainous male principle in life, and a fluid female one, and life is best when one flows nimbly round the other, as rivers round cities — and one need not endorse this rather old-fashioned, patriarchal Irish view to appreciate the passion, the infinite resourcefulness, of its expression. Great writing, like first love, works best as an obvious idea freshly enacted — an old book, newly bought.