In the late 19th century, Auburn college students took to greasing the tracks before the football game with Georgia Tech, their arch rivals, so that the train carrying the Georgia Tech team was unable to stop at the station. The team had to lug its gear back to the station, sometimes from miles away.
Han van Meegeren (1889 – 1947) was a Dutch painter who began his career painting portraits of upper class Dutch people.
But frustrated with his limited success as a painter (critics called his work derivative) he turned to art forgery, imitating the styles of old masters, including Johannes Vermeer (1632 – 1675). Many museums and collectors paid tremendous amounts of money for his forgeries, making him rich.
His Supper at Emmaus, which was “discovered” in 1937, was hailed by art experts as one of the finest paintings Vermeer had ever painted. During the late thirties, several more “Vermeers” were discovered. This was exciting, because Vermeers are rare; there are only 36 of them known in the world. Here’s Supper at Emmaus, one of van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers:
The Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and during the five-year occupation, many priceless works of art were acquired by Hitler and his second-in-command, Hermann Goering, who fancied themselves art experts. (The Nazis bought, stole, and looted artwork throughout Europe, from museums and private collections.)
In 1945, the Allies captured Goering, and one of van Meegeren’s forged Vermeers was found in Goering’s huge art collection. Its sale was traced back to van Meegeren. Dutch officials, believing it to be a real Vermeer, had van Meegeren arrested as a Nazi collaborator. He was accused of selling Dutch property to the Nazis. Faced with life in prison or possibly the death penalty, van Meegeren confessed to having forged that and other paintings. He became famous immediately as one of the most audacious forgers ever.
It took some time to convince the authorities. He produced various glasses and jars from his own possessions that could be seen in his forged paintings. Because people still didn’t believe he’d painted the fake Vermeers, he had to paint another one while in police custody. Here’s a photo of him painting in front of witnesses:
During his trial, he explained his process, which had taken him years to perfect. He bought 17th century canvasses, and scraped off the top layer of paint. He mixed his own pigments using those approximating what the old masters would have used. And most ingeniously, he used bakelite (phenol formaldehyde) instead of oil paints, mixing it with the pigment. Bakelite is a liquid, and when you heat it, it hardens like a telephone. So after painting with the bakelite, he baked the paintings in the oven until the paint cracked. Then he washed them with diluted ink to blacken the cracks so the surface looked like it was three hundred years old.
From what I can tell, van Meegeren was a pretty unsavory guy. He had grown rich during a time when many Dutch people under Nazi occupation were starving. Having been snubbed (in his view) by Dutch art critics, he had put on exhibits of his work in Nazi Germany. Most damning, a book of his artwork was found in Hitler’s possession, containing a dedication to “My beloved Führer,” and inscribed by van Meegeren.
But in the two years between his arrest and the trial, he turned the tide of public sentiment in his favor. He became somewhat of a national hero: the cunning forger who had fooled not just the Nazis, but also the snooty art experts. He zoomed to the top of popularity polls.
Van Meegeren was convicted of forgery, and sentenced to a year in prison, but he died of a heart attack before he could serve out his sentence.
If you have twelve minutes to spare, here’s a fascinating overview of the story, narrated by an expert at the Boymans Museum.
In 1700, unmarried women were taxed in Berlin (possibly to promote marriage and childbirth, or possibly because unmarried women who worked were a threat to the guild system).
In 1850, the population in the US was 23 million. 3.2 million were black slaves.
Francois Vatel (1631 – 1671) was a famous chef who put on an extravagant banquet for 2,000 people in honor of King Louis XIV. When mishaps occurred, including the late delivery of the seafood, he killed himself by running himself through with his sword.
Charles II of England died in 1685, killed by his well-meaning doctors.
He had some sort of mild stroke while shaving one morning, something from which he very likely would have recovered nowadays. But fourteen desperate physicians, feeling serious pressure to keep him alive, tried to revive him. It was necessary to get his humors in balance, of course. These would have been the best doctors in the land.
Here’s what treatments were administered, according to a description the chief physician, Sir Charles Scarburgh, recorded in his diary:
He was bled a pint of blood.
His shoulder was cut and 8 ounces more blood was sucked out by “cupping.” In this charming procedure, cuts were made and cylinders shaped like wine glasses were put over the cuts and then flamed to expel air—they acted as suction devices to draw out blood.
Then he was given an emetic (something to make him vomit), a purgative (something taken orally to induce, well, things to swiften in the digestive tract), and another purgative, and an enema (another, um, more invasive way to get him to evacuate his bowels). Another enema. Two hours later, another purgative.
Unfortunately for the king, he stirred a bit, which made his ecstatic doctors feel he would benefit from more blood-letting.
I’ll let Sir Charles take over from here:
“The king’s scalp was shaved and a blister raised.” Sorry, Sir Charles, but I can’t resist interjecting here. The blisters he was given contained smooshed Spanishfly (cantharis is a type of blister beetle that is neither Spanish nor a fly), which not only raises blisters but also passes quickly into the system and irritates the urinary tract, causing more frequent urination. Oh and also delirium, convulsions, vomiting, extreme gastrointestinal upset, and death. (I blogged about Spanishfly here and also here.) All right, Sir Charles, go on. “A sneezing powder of hellebore was administered.” How did this work? They took the powdered form of the poisonous white hellebore lily and blew it up the king’s nostrils to initiate sneezing. “A plaster of burgundy pitch and pigeon dung was applied to the feet. Medicaments included melon seeds, manna, slippery-elm, black cherry water, lime flowers, lily of the valley, peony, lavender, and dissolved pearls.”
By the next morning the king was, miraculously, still alive. Encouraged by their treatment protocol, the doctors decided he would benefit from more bleeding, and opened up both jugular veins.
But then he got worse. So they administered “forty drops of extract of human skull.”
More medicaments. Then, as a last ditch effort, ammonia was forced down the king’s throat. At last the exhausted king finally expired—probably of a brain hemorrhage.
The poet W.H. Auden issued his house guests a single sheet of toilet paper, believing more was too wasteful.
By now it’s pretty well-accepted among medieval historians that the civilizations most responsible for preserving ancient Greek and Roman scholarship after the fall of the Roman Empire were the Arabs. Crusader-knights witnessed firsthand how much more advanced many of the cities of the East were. Besides their magnificent libraries storing this ancient knowledge, Constantinople, Damascus, and Baghdad had much more sophisticated art, architecture, and hygiene than their European counterparts did.
Medieval medicine invited yet another dismal comparison. Here’s a passage written by a 12th-century Arab doctor who’d been called in to consult with his European counterparts. Warning: it’s not for the faint of heart:
They brought before me a knight in whose leg an abscess had grown; and a woman afflicted with imbecility. To the knight I applied a small poultice until the abscess opened and became well; and the woman I put on diet and made her humor wet. Then a Frankish physician came to them and said, “This man knows nothing about treating them.” He then said to the knight, “Which wouldst thou prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?” The latter replied, “Living with one leg.” The physician said, “Bring me a strong knight and a sharp ax.” A knight came with the ax. And I was standing by. Then the physician laid the leg of the patient on a block of wood and bade the knight strike his leg with the ax and chop it off at one blow. Accordingly he struck it- while I was looking on-one blow, but the leg was not severed. He dealt another blow, upon which the marrow of the leg flowed out and the patient died on the spot. He then examined the woman and said, “This is a woman in whose head there is a devil which has possessed her. Shave off her hair.” Accordingly they shaved it off and the woman began once more to cat their ordinary diet-garlic and mustard. Her imbecility took a turn for the worse. The physician then said, “The devil has penetrated through her head.” He therefore took a razor, made a deep cruciform incision on it, peeled off the skin at the middle of the incision until the bone of the skull was exposed and rubbed it with salt. The woman also expired instantly. Thereupon I asked them whether my services were needed any longer, and when they replied in the negative I returned home, having learned of their medicine what I knew not before.*
Cleopatra (69-30 B.C.), the last ruling Pharaoh of Egypt, spoke Greek as her native language. She was the first and only member of her dynasty to learn Egyptian.
The Etruscans often wrote using the boustropheon style, where the direction of the writing alternates with each line (right to left, then left to right).