A secret garden within the grand park of Florence’s Boboli Gardens has opened to the public for the first time since it was created in the middle of the 17th century. The Garden of the Camelias was reserved for the personal use of the Medici grand ducal family, so even though it was built under the towering ramparts and walls that separate the Palazzo Pitti courtyard from the park, it was designed to keep it safe from prying eyes.

Built in the mid-17th century for Mattias de’ Medici, third son of Grand Duke Cosimo II and governor of Siena, the garden was directly connected to Mattias’ apartments in Palazzo Pitti. He had it filled with exotic plants, rare citrus fruits and water features. An artificial arched cave near the entrance blocked the view into the secret garden. Rumor has it he enjoyed cavorting with his lovers there, hence the deliberate effort to keep the section closest to his apartments out of view.

In 1688, Mattias’ grand-nephew Ferdinand, Grand Prince of Tuscany, restructured the garden to celebrate his wedding to Violante of Bavaria. The grottos, frescoes, pathways and overall look of the garden today springs from Ferdinand’s redesign. The fine collection of camelias that give it its name was added in the 19th century.

Over the centuries, the garden fell into disrepair. Drainage issues caused major structural damage, to the point where it subject to landslides and walls were falling apart. It was so dangerous opening it to the public was out of the question. In 2021, the funding was secured to embark on a complex restoration of the architecture, structure, frescoed surfaces, sculptures, water features and landscaping.

The first section goes from the entry into a stone walk-through grotto built with stones of various sizes meant to simulate a natural cave. This section is in direct contact with the public Boboli Gardens. The second section is the private garden on the other side of the grotto. A path bordered by flowers, shrubs and planters full of flowers leads into the Lorraine Grotto, frescoed in 1819 and centered around a statue of Hygieia. The water features have now been enhanced with new lighting to illuminate the frescoed vault.

The garden is small and delicate, so visitors will only be allowed 15 people at a time and only with guided tours.

This playlist of short video clips gives a lovely walkthrough of springtime in the Garden of the Camelias.

A ledger book containing 1,800 cut-paper silhouette portraits made by English immigrant William Bache in the early 1800s has been digitized by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Portraits of luminaries like George and Martha Washington keep company with Virginia tavern keepers and Caribbean priests, people from all income levels and professions.

This unique record of Federal-era social history was acquired by the NPG in 2002. In 2008, conservators discovered that the album contained arsenic which made it unsafe for display, never mind allowing researchers to leaf through it, a’ la The Name of the Rose.

The National Portrait Gallery used Getty’s support to overcome these limitations by fully digitizing the entire volume. Robyn Asleson, the lead curator and curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, also completed extensive research that confirms the identities of hundreds of sitters in New Orleans and generates a new understanding of traveling portrait artists at the turn of the 19th century. […]

Asleson and research assistant Elizabeth Isaacson scanned through Ancestry.com, digitized newspapers, history books, baptismal records, wills and other legal documents to unveil the identity of sitters, including many of Afro Caribbean descent for whom no other likeness is known to exist. Users of the microsite can now “flip” through pages of the album and click on high-res images of each portrait to learn the sitter’s full name, lifespan or years active and the date their portrait was created.

William Bache had no artistic training, but he was able to develop a successful career as a silhouette maker, traveling to cities all over the eastern seaboard of the United States and reaching as far south as Cuba. He used his own patented version of a physionotrace, a mechanical drawing frame first invented in France in the waning days of the Ancien Régime, to capture the outline of people’s profiles and reproduce them quickly and cheaply. His newspaper advertisements emphasized the cheap part, offering “four correct profiles for 25 cents,” about $5 in today’s money.

The fixed features of the face like the shape of the nose, jaw and brow were subject of intense study in the late 18th century. Pioneered by Swiss poet and minister Johann Kaspar Lavater, author of the seminal work on physiognomy (1775-1778), the pseudoscientific pursuit correlated the physical features of the face to a person’s character and personality. In order to document the physiognomy of an individual in the most objective way possible, Lavater advocated tracing the “lines of countenance,” the contours of a person’s head and face, to measure their proportions and angles and thereby “scientifically” determine their character.

To ensure the most accurate possible record of the lines of countenance, Lavater devised a method to trace a profile from life by mounting a wood frame to the side of a chair. The subject sat facing forward, gripping the frame and its rigid mounts to stay as still as possible. A piece of tracing paper was fitted into the frame and a candle lit on the other side of the chair. He would then trace the shadow cast by her face onto the paper.

An even greater leap forward in removing artistic interpretation from portraiture was achieved by engineer and engraver Gilles-Louis Chrétien in 1784. He invented the physionotrace, a wooden frame large enough for a person to sit in turned to the side. The person’s chin was supported and fixed the head so it would not move. The artist/machinist would then trace a life-sized or scale portrait using a pencil connected via a metal arm to another pencil that made a copy on a separate sheet of paper.

Within a week, that drawing could be quickly reproduced in scaled-down sizes. They became a popular fashion trend in the French Revolutionary and First Empire period. Sitters would buy portrait packages of the large likeness and smaller prints, which could be filled in with extremely precise details. Each portrait was identical, unlike the painted portrait miniatures.

This mechanism was very well-suited to the production of silhouettes. You got an outline of the profile on the spot, and an easy and fast means to reproduce the exact profile on a smaller scale. Unfortunately the patent records of Bache’s 1803 physiognotrace were destroyed in an 1836 fire, so we don’t know exactly what his machine was like. His partner Isaac Todd wrote that it was different from its predecessors in its ability to “trace the human face with ‘mathematical correctness’ without touching it.”

Flip through the digitized Ledger Book of William Bache’s silhouettes on this website. Each silhouette is clickable for individual identification. You can also navigate it by name using the index.

A group of 17th century wall paintings have been discovered during renovations of a flat in Mickelgate, York. A section of painted plaster was first discovered behind a kitchen cabinet by refitters working on the apartment of Dr. Luke Budworth. He later found a larger section boarded up high on the wall below the ceiling.

The paintings are believed to date to the 1660s. They are scenes from a book that was popular at that time, Emblems by poet Francis Quarles, first published in 1635. An emblem book was a collection of allegorical or symbolic images illustrating epigrams, poems and/or commentary. Quarles took the form in a new direction with his Emblems, paraphrasing the Bible in the complex figurative language of the metaphysical poets and adding a verse epigram at the end. Each Emblem was accompanied by an illustration in the grotesque style (meaning cherubs and florals and filigrees inspired by the frescoes of the Domus Aurea, not in the modern sense of “grotesque”) by engraver William Marshall.

(Fun fact: Quarles had 18 children with his wife Ursula. Among his many, MANY direct descendants were several poets, including the African-American luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes.)

Damage to the wall paintings makes them difficult to identify, but one of the scenes of the ceiling frieze is the Marshall illustration of Book V, Emblem X. An angel is picking the lock of a cage holding a man captive. It’s a representation of Psalm 142.7 “Lord, free my Captive Soul; and then thy Praise/Shall fill the remnant of my joyful Days.” Under the painting of the angel freeing the captive soul is the epigram that concludes that emblem, painting in white text over a black background:

Paul’s midnight voice prevail’d; his music’s thunder
Unhinge’d the prison-doors, split bolts in sunder :
And sitt’st thou here, and hang’st the feeble wing?
And whine’st to be enlarged? Soul, learn to sing.

Simon Taylor, Historic England’s senior architectural investigator for the north region, said it was an “exciting rediscovery”.

“We think they are of national significance and in the context of York, where domestic wall paintings are quite rare, they are of special interest,” he said.

The wall the scenes are painted on could be older than the buildings on either side of it, he said.

The paintings are also cut off by the ceiling and the front of the building, which could help researchers piece together the development of the street.

Luke can’t afford the expense of full conservation out of his own pocket, but he’s seeking funding for the project. For now, he has covered up the frieze with a high resolution printout of pictures of the paintings to protect them from the sun.

The Lavatory de la Madeleine, the first public toilet in France, has been restored to its belle époque splendor. Visitors will be able to urinate surrounded by floral stained glass windows, glossy mahogany paneling, brass taps, painted ceramic ceiling tiles, mirrored hexagonal pilasters and mosaic floors. They can enjoy period Art Nouveau posters and a display case of other period ephemera while they wait.

The toilets were built in 1905 underneath the Place de la Madeleine in 8th arrondissement of Paris by bathroom designers Porcher. They were showpieces, meant to convey the elegance, beauty and innovation of French design to meet the most lowly of public needs. Inspired by the luxurious public lavatories of Victorian London, it was decorated in Art Nouveau style whose characteristic stylized botanicals adorn the tiles, stained glass and paneling. This Madeleine facility was a women’s restroom. The men’s equivalent across the square is no longer a bathroom, repurposed to install technical equipment for the metro. The ladies room was converted into a unisex facility in the 1990s when some of the stalls were converted into urinals.

The Lavatory de la Madeleine were granted historic monument status in March 2011, just in time to be closed by the city. The mayor of the 8th arrondissement protested the closure, believing the bathroom could be a draw for tourism, but the city found that the traffic was too low (350 visits a day) to justify the maintenance costs. It was also impossible to make the toilets accessible while maintaining their historic character due to the entrance staircase and small stalls.

In 2015, the city council agreed to restore and reopen six exceptional historic toilets in Paris, in the Madeleine facility. Madeleine posed many challenges. It had been used as a rubbish dump after its closure and water infiltration problems caused damage so extensive that it has taken all this time to repair, and they’re not quite done yet. The mosaic entrance is still cracked and is now being studied to determine the cause of the problem before it is restored next year.

The restoration of the woodwork, glass and tiles was finally completed last month but the toilets, sinks and taps have been replaced with similar modern models. An old shoe-shine chair, preserved on the site, adds to the impression of entering a grand “throne room”.

This elevated excretory experience will cost you, unlike the other 435 public toilets in Paris which are free of charge. “You get what you pay for” applies here, however, perhaps better here than in any other context I’ve ever heard of. The €2 fee will cover the cost of an attendant and maintenance personnel tasked to clean the bathroom after every single visit. This will ensure it does not fall into gross disrepair again.