Category: Modern(ish)

Janet Stephens is back!

Ancient, Modern(ish), Multimedia

It’s been more than a year and a half since Janet Stephens posted one of her epic historic hairstyling tutorials using period-accurate tools and it’s been three years since the last Roman hairstyle. Now she’s back with an intricate 9-strand braid worn by the Empress Herennia Etruscilla in the mid-3rd century A.D.

The 3rd century was a chaotic time for the Roman Empire. After the assassination of the last Severan emperor, Severus Alexander, in 235, the combination of internal political turmoil, civil wars, Germanic invasions, increasing expansion of the Persian Sassanid Empire, economic depression and plagues, nearly drove the empire to collapse. By 268, like the Gaul of Julius Caesar’s time, the empire itself was divided into three parts — the Gallic Roman Empire (Gaul, Britannia and Hispania), the  Palmyrene Empire (Syria, Egypt, Arabia, Asia Minor) and the Roman Empire (Italy). It would be reunited under in 270 by Aurelian, builder of the walls around Rome. The Crisis would come to its full end with the ascension of Diocletian in 284, 26 dead emperors after it began.

So when Herennia Etruscilla was getting her hair did by extremely nimble-fingered ornatrices, she was enjoying what would be a very brief window of time at the top. Her husband Decius was acclaimed as emperor in September 249 after he killed his predecessor Philip the Arab. His reign lasted less than two years, ending with his death in battle at the hands of the Goths in June 251. His and Herennia Etruscilla’s oldest son and co-emperor died with him. Their youngest son, 13-year-old Hostilian, succeeded to the throne, but only as co-emperor to the troops’ choice Trebonianus Gallus, and only for a few months before his death either from plague or at the hand of said Trebonianus Gallus.

During those few months of Hostilian’s rise to the purple, Herennia Etruscilla acted as regent. Almost nothing is known about her life, but thanks to the devaluation of currency and the constant cranking out of coinage, we have a surprisingly rich record of her portraiture. There are 13 different coins from aurei to sestertii that feature her profile with views of her elaborate hairstyling.

From one of those coin portraits, Janet selected a nine-strand braid arranged in a column style, meaning in a single thick plait up the back of the head. It requires a dexterity beyond my comprehension and hair of such length and thickness that it’s no wonder it took Janet a decade to get to this look. It is truly a masterful feat of patience and skill. My one regret is that she wasn’t able to include the stephane — a Hellenic style of diadem that comes to a point in the front — that Herennia Etruscilla Augusta wears in all of her coins.

Date update: Methuselah gets six siblings

Ancient, Modern(ish)

It feels like just yesterday when I wrote about Methuselah, the date palm germinated from a 2,000-year-old seed recovered from Masada, but it was 12 years ago. This must be the longest stretch between an original story and an update yet. It is occasioned by a new study of six ancient date palm seeds that have been successfully germinated. Now Adam, Jonah, Uriel, Boaz, Judith and Hannah have joined their ancient brother in growing from seed to seedling.

The six well-preserved seeds were discovered in archaeological excavations of Masada (Adam), Qumran (Jonah, Uriel, Boaz, Judith) and Wadi Makukh (Hannah) from the 1960s through the 1990s. The ages of the seeds were determined by radiocarbon dating of the shell fragments collected from the roots when the plants were repotted. Methuselah, his Masada brother Adam and Hannah are the oldest, dating to between the 4th and 1st century B.C. Judith and Boaz are the middle kids, dating to the mid-2nd century B.C. to the mid-1st century A.D. Uriel and Jonah are the babies of the family dating to the 1st-2nd century A.D.

The team was able to use DNA analysis to discover the sex of the germinated seedlings and to map out the geographic origin of their genotypes.  (Methuselah is indeed a male plant, by the way. We didn’t know if there was a chance of getting an ancient date when it was first germinated, but now we do. He’s a pollen producer, not a fruiter.) Interestingly, the age of the seeds correlates with their genetic admixture. The oldest three have the most eastern genotypes. Judith and Boaz have equal western and eastern genotypes. Jonah and Uriel have the most western. The large size of the seeds is evidence that they were domesticated (wild seeds are much smaller) and the genetic analysis indicates extensive cross-breeding of females with foreign males to keep the stock vigorous and varied.

Date palms have been cultivated in the Jordan River Valley since the Neolithic and the wild date is widespread on the banks of the river and in the hills around the Dead Sea. Palm trees, leaves and dates appear often in the Hebrew scripture — waved in the Sukkot holiday, to celebrate military victories, used in temple rituals, decorating palaces and sacred buildings, even in place names — and their significance was transmitted to Christian tradition, viz Palm Sunday. Ancient writers from Herodotus to Hippocrates praised the Judean date for culinary and medicinal qualities. It was semi-dry and therefore easily stored long-term, unlike Egyptian or Cypriot varieties that rotted quickly. Theophrastus (c. 371- 287 B.C.) wrote in his botanical treatise Enquiry into Plants:

It likes a soil which contains salt; wherefore, where such soil is not available, the growers sprinkle salt about it; and this must not be done about the actual roots: one must keep the salt some way off and sprinkle about a gallon. To shew that it seeks such a soil they offer the following proof; wherever date-palms grow abundantly, the soil is salt, both in Babylon, they say, where the tree is indigenous, in Libya in Egypt and in Phoenicia; while in Coele-Syria [modern-day Israel], where are most palms, only in three districts, they say, where the soil is salt, are dates produced which can be stored; those that grow in other districts do not keep, but rot, though when fresh they are sweet and men use them at that stage.

The Judean date’s long storage properties made them ideal emergency rations. Josephus mentions them “heaps” of dates at the fortress of Masada. The date palm was so strongly associated with Judea that it was frequently depicted on ancient shekels and, after Titus’ sack of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., on Roman IUDAEA CAPTA coinage for more than twenty years. The date palm still features prominently on coins and medallions issued by the modern state of Israel.

The research team is hoping to pick up where ancient farmers left off and do some pollinating of their own once Judith and Hannah reach sexual maturity. If, fingers crossed, they’re able to produce Judean dates once again, of course we’ll have no way of knowing if they have the same taste and texture.

Lumière’s train in 4K

Modern(ish), Multimedia

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, filmed by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895 and first shown to an amazed public in January 1896, has gone upscale, 4K upscale, to be precise. Urban legend has it that when audiences first viewed the train barreling towards them on the screen, they screamed and ran for the back of the room. There is no evidence that any such reaction actually happened, no contemporary accounts of it in the press or police reports, but the Lumière Brothers’ thoughtful camera placement certainly created a dynamic 50 seconds of film that caused a sensation.

Surviving prints of the original 35 mm film, while still perfectly viewable, show their age; they’re grainy, faded, scratched. Upscaling film using photochemical restoration methods costs tens of thousands of dollars. Videographer Denis Shiryaev used Gigapixel AI software, an application that deploys artificial intelligence algorithms to fill in the gaps in the images and upscale the 125-year-old film to 4K. He also used the freeware app Dain to interpolate missing frames. That’s a lot of bang for very few bucks.

Shiryaev’s digital restoration benefitted majorly from a source video that had already been restored, eliminating the striations, bubbles, stains, etc. and giving him a pristine slate.

Comparison time! Here’s a version of the original with an assortment of defects typical of old film:

Here’s the digitally restored version Shiryaev used as a source:

And here’s Shiryaev’s 4K, 60 frames per second upscale version:

I’m fascinated by the richness and depth of the images, but it’s giving me a bit of an uncanny valley vibe too. He also made a colorized version which is even uncannier.

Charlotte Brontë mini-manuscript returns to Haworth

Modern(ish)

A tiny manuscript written by Charlotte Brontë when she was 14 years old has returned to the house in Haworth where she wrote it. After a fundraising campaign promoted by famous people like Judi Dench, the Brontë Society was able to acquire it at auction in Paris in November 2019 for €600,000 ($660,000)  hammer price. Now it has gone on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the family’s former home that today has the largest collection of Brontë-related objects in the world.

The book is a miniature, at 2.4 inches high and 1.4 inches wide about the size of a matchbox. The 20-page folio is bound in a brown paper cover and inserted in a red folder. The folder was kept in a brown morocco case. The title page alone is a gem:

SECOND SERIES OF THE

YOUR MEN’S

MAGAZINES . NO

SECOND

FOR SEPTEMBER 1830

Edited by Charlotte Brontë

SOLD

BY

SEARGEANT TREE

AND ALL

OTHER

Booksellers in the chief Glass Town Paris Ross GT Parrys GT Wellingtons Glass Town &c &c &c August Finished August 19, 1830 Charlotte

The table of contents on the next page lists the short stories in the short volume:  A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley, The Midnight Song by Marquis Donato and Frenchman’s Journal by Tree. The author names are as fictional as the stories. Charlotte wrote everything, of course. The stories are followed by the Advertisements section, because even at 14 Charlotte evinced a keen understanding of the intersection between literature and commerce. She managed to fit more than 4,000 words on these tiny pages, just 17 of them if you deduct the title and half-title/contents.

Charlotte’s mini-magazine was one of six she wrote as a teenager, inspired by Blackwood’s Magazine, the family’s favorite periodical. It was set in the fictional “glass World,” the first of many imaginary worlds created by the brilliant but isolated Brontë siblings when they were home-schooled after the deaths of their two older sisters caused by the deprivations they suffered at the brutal Clergy Daughters’ School in Lancashire, later immortalized by Charlotte as Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

The Brontë Parsonage Museum has five of the six “little books” now that they’ve acquired number two. Number five is lost, its whereabouts unknown since the 1930s.

Hampton Court Palace buys Victoria’s boots, bloomers & bodice

Modern(ish)

Historic Royal Palaces has acquired two pairs of leather ankle boots by J Sparks-Hall of London, a black taffeta skirt and two black bodices belonging to Queen Victoria at a January 21st auction. The group sold for £14,000. Other pieces from the wardrobe of Victoria that were on sale at the auction, including a pair of capacious silk bloomers embroidered with a crown, a pair of wool and cream silk stockings, a cream silk parasol, sold for an additional £3,000.

The boots, both made by J Sparkes, Hall & Son of Regent Street, London, are made of brown kid leather. The more expensive pair is lined in a red silk border and has a gold stitched butterfly on the toe and a 1″ stacked heel. They doubled the high pre-sale estimate and went for £4,000. A slightly less dramatic pair with a blue silk border and a floral leaf designed stitched on the top of the toes sold for £2,000. The black taffeta skirt embellished with lace and jet sold for double the high estimate as well, £4,000. The two black silk taffeta bodices with lace embellishments from Victoria’s long mourning also sold for £4,000.

Claudia Williams, collections curator at Historic Royal Palaces, said: “As well as being included in future displays, these items reveal that, contrary to popular belief, Queen Victoria did not abandon all interest in her appearance after the death of her beloved Prince Albert, and highlight how – in an era of black and white photography – she exploited clothing’s capacity to communicate, using it as a potent visual symbol of her undying love for her husband.”

The articles of clothing were put up for auction by electrical engineer Roderick Hanson, great-great-grandson of royal photographer Alexander Lamont Henderson who was granted  the Royal Warrant to capture everyday royal life and worked for the queen until her death in 1901. Henderson was known for his experiments in color photography and Victoria commissioned portraits of Prince Albert and Scottish attendant John Brown from him. Family lore says he received the pieces from the queen’s servants (she often gave away her garments and accessories after she was done with them), perhaps as memorials after her death.

After his own death in 1907, Henderson’s collection of the queen’s clothing was passed down to his descendants. Roderick Hanson says they’ve been kept in a wardrobe and he’s selling the lot now to make some space. He needs it apparently, because he’s definitely not selling his ancestor’s art works.

“I’m not parting with Alexander’s glass plate negatives and enamel pictures, which are of a very high quality. He was an extremely talented photographer.”

I’d pick the enamel pictures over the split-crotch bloomers any day.