Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of ancient warfare. It also exemplifies how elite patrons across diverse artistic cultures commission artworks that draw ...
Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of ancient warfare. It also exemplifies how elite patrons across diverse artistic cultures commission artworks that draw inspiration from and celebrate past and present events important to the community. Specificity of visual imagery (e.g., identifiable protagonists, carefully rendered details, and inscriptions) combined with commemorative intent differentiates historical subjects from scenes conceived generically or drawn from daily life. In celebrating events meaningful to those holding power, historical subjects are propagandistic in that they foster a supremely favorable conception of those responsible for their creation. Yet no matter how carefully makers try to control the message, artworks can acquire an autonomy that permits audiences to construct “memories” of those events never intended.
Properly speaking, the Alexander Mosaic’s manufacture comprises Roman work, but most scholars believe it reflects a lost painting described by Pliny the Elder: “Philoxenos of Eretria painted a picture for King Cassander which must be considered second to none, which represented the battle of Alexander against Darius” (NH 35.110). This would date to ca. 330-310 BC, when memories of the battle were still fresh, and its propaganda value would be most effective. That painting may have been brought to Italy as plunder after the Roman conquest of Macedonia in 146 BC. The fact that the mosaic reproduces an earlier work for a later audience forces us to consider the discrepancies between historical narrative and artistic tradition.
All of the surviving accounts of Alexander’s conquests were written against the background of Roman imperialism, and ancient readers necessarily interpreted what they read in the light of the social and political structures that characterized their age. Alexander “the Great” was a Roman creation: the title first appears in a Roman comedy by Plautus in the early second century BC. Because historical representations are distinctive and clearly recognizable to contemporary viewers, since its discovery in the House of the Faun at Pompeii in 1831, scholars have had to reckon with how the mosaic’s imagery functioned in two very different contexts: first as a fourth-century Greek painting and then as a first-century Roman mosaic. A painting celebrating a Macedonian victory meant something quite distinct when originally displayed in a Hellenistic palace than when it was possibly displayed as war booty in a Roman temple; and the mosaic copy in a Roman private house would carry still different significance. For a Roman audience, the commemorative specificity of the battle scene was probably less important than celebrating the qualities of Alexander’s personality that spoke to them: his ferocity in battle, his charisma, and his military genius. Alexander was as much a part of the cultural memory of Rome as Homeric epic was for Greece, providing a paradigm for their own military triumphs.
Heinrich Fuhrmann first suggested that the Roman patron of the artwork had participated in the Macedonian Wars, and that this mosaic copy of a spoil of war functioned as both a sign of his admiration for the “greatest” general and perpetuated the memory of his own role in overthrowing the dynasty that Alexander founded. A Roman viewer might have imagined a broader reenactment of the paradigmatic conflict between East and West, a conflict he may have participated in or merely appreciated through the lens of Roman ideology. Given the Roman taste for the allusive, a history become anachronistic could have also been appropriated and meaningfully reused through a cognitive metaphor whereby in place of Alexander’s empire, Roman viewers could have understood their own (since Rome had conquered the territories formerly occupied by Macedonia). Roman sources repeatedly compare Roman campaigns on the eastern frontier with earlier Greek struggles. Given that Parthia, which had fought on the Persian side against Alexander, was now Rome’s enemy in the east and Alexander’s legacy was now Roman, a Roman viewer could have easily identified with the Greeks. Furthermore, the patron who commissioned the mosaic copy belonged to the new Roman ruling class, which appropriated older Greek artworks—the fruits of their conquest—to express social status. It was prominently featured in a luxury dwelling, of a type also of Greek origin, whose colonnaded courtyards and receptions rooms were sumptuously decorated with other paintings and sculptures meant to impress visitors. Its Roman owner may even have appreciated the Alexander Mosaic as a “work of art”: an image divorced from its original context by its new role in a Roman social performance.
When artworks reconstruct a past in order to explain the present, their makers determine which events are remembered and rearrange them to conform to the required social narrative. Their display provides visible manifestations of collective memories. More than merely passive reflections, monuments with historical subjects reinforce those memories and confer them prestige. Divergent motivations were again in evidence after the Alexander Mosaic’s discovery when various European leaders such as the Prussian King Fredrick Wilhelm IV ordered copies of the copy: was the motivation for such modern commissions the desire for prestige achieved through association with a masterpiece from antiquity or with the political symbolism of its historical subject?
Featured image: Alexander Mosaic (ca. 100 BCE), Naples, Museo archeologico nazionale. Berthold Werner via Wikimedia Commons.
The dream of flying has a long premodern history. Think of the myth of Daedalus, the ancient Greek inventor who designed wings for himself, and his ill-fated son Icarus. Or think of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketches and studies of birds and flying devices.
It might surprise many to know that, centuries before Leonardo da Vinci depicted birds in flight and flying machines in Renaissance Italy, an intrepid polymath in the city of Córdoba, in today’s Spain, may have carried out an experiment in early human gliding flight. My book, A Bridge to the Sky, focuses on that intrepid ninth-century aeronaut, Abbas Ibn Firnas, and the Islamic civilization that provides the backdrop and context for his life and work. As a specialist in medieval Islamic architecture, art, and history during the caliphal period (c.650-1250 CE) most of my work has focused on Córdoba, the capital of early Islamic Iberia. In A Bridge to the Sky I set out to understand Ibn Firnas’ unusual experiment, to try to understand why an intellectual in a medieval Islamic context imagined and then is reported by his contemporaries to have carried out such an unusual experiment, and why this might be significant for the way we understand the past.
Like the prototypical “Renaissance Man” Leonardo, with whom he is often compared, Ibn Firnas was a person of many talents: a poet, a musician, a philosopher, and a ‘scientist’ who designed fine scientific instruments for the Umayyad dynasty who ruled Córdoba and Iberia between the 8th and 11th centuries. He carried out fascinating experiments and activities that combine science and art, including designing and creating a chamber in his home that sounds very much like the medieval version of a 3D immersive Virtual Reality experience: famously, this experience made ninth century viewers imagine they were seeing stars, lightning, and clouds, and hearing thunder.
My book introduces readers to Ibn Firnas and his flight experiment, against the backdrop of caliphal artistic and intellectual cultures. Those who play the new Assassin’s Creed Mirage video game will find a different type of introduction in the game’s setting, its characters, and the historical information contained in its Codex.
The connections between my book and the game are reflective of my work as an external historian on Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which was released by Ubisoft in October 2023. The narrative setting of Mirage is Baghdad in the ninth century, and my role was to provide the Ubisoft in-house historians with detailed historical information about medieval Baghdad and Islamic art, history, and civilisation in the caliphal period.
The topics and entries represented in the game’s educational feature, known as the “History of Baghdad,” were chosen by Ubisoft’s historians, and were based on a series of thematic workshops that were very like an intensive graduate research seminar on the history and visual culture of the caliphal period. Out of those workshops, the Ubisoft team chose things they thought were important to include, focusing on art and the exact sciences (especially astronomy and engineering), all of which are central to A Bridge to the Sky.
For instance, players of Mirage can read about astrolabes, celestial globes, and other scientific instruments of the time, and see these illustrated in the Codex, much as they are in my book. In the game they’ll encounter astronomers, an astronomical observatory, and references to important treatises, including ones on astronomy, engineering, mathematics, and other exact sciences, which I write about in A Bridge to the Sky.
In A Bridge to the Sky, I write about the Banu Musa, three intellectual brothers who were ninth-century contemporaries of Ibn Firnas. Important Abbasid courtiers in Baghdad, they are especially well known for their work in engineering, thanks to their important treatise, The book of ingenious devices (Kitāb al-ḥiyal). In Mirage, players have the chance to ‘meet’ the Banu Musa, who provide Mirage’s protagonist, Basim, with ingenious tools and mechanical devices. Indeed, one of the game quests has players seeking one of the brothers, Ahmad, in the House of Wisdom, and investigating his workshop there.
I’ll leave it to players to learn if Ibn Firnas makes an appearance in the game, though I will say that players who go looking will find intriguing references to a flight experiment.
While working on a video game might be an unusual choice for a scholar, my reasons for doing so are the same ones that led me to write a Bridge to the Sky—a desire to make academic knowledge about medieval Islamic art and history widely accessible to broader audiences. In that sense my book and Assassin’s CreedMirage are quite similar. Both depict a vibrant age of scientific and artistic achievement in which caliphal intellectuals imagined, created, and experimented with art and science, and which shares many similarities with later times and places, such as Renaissance Florence, with which today we are much more familiar. My hope is that readers of A Bridge to the Sky and those who follow Basim in his adventures through Baghdad in Mirage will come away with a new appreciation for the Age of the Caliphs and a period of medieval intellectual and artistic innovation that profoundly shaped global history, including Italy in the age of Leonardo, and eventually Europe’s Scientific Revolution.
The Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) is often thought of as one of the Renaissance´s greatest self-promoters. He might even be categorized as a “reputational entrepreneur.” Dürer was the first artist to depict himself on self-standing portrait panels. These three portraits now hang in some of Europe´s most important collections—the Louvre, the Prado, and Munich´s Alte Pinakothek—and frame our own image of him. Most strikingly, the German artist depicted himself on the last of these as almost identical to Christ. To many, the portraits hint at his arrogance and the type of Renaissance self-centeredness that culminates in the selfie culture of today.
Dürer’s portrayals can be understood through the rise of the art market. Anything recognizably done by his hand fetched better prices than what came out of a workshop as collaborative effort. To develop a distinctive approach to art, Dürer cultivated his mastery of depicting hair naturalistically with the finest brushes. Dürer turned his own hairstyle into something iconic—by 1500 he sported long, curled hair with golden highlights. It is thought that he kept his last, Christ-like self-portrait at home to attract clients. In relation to his printed work, Dürer fought hard to get a copyright on his monogram. Why? He was not a court artist, salaried and dressed by a ruler, but lived from what he made and sold, day-by-day.
It is easily overlooked therefore that there was great precarity to his life for much of his career. What looks like arrogance was bound up with fear and assertion out of anger against mean patrons. Becoming a painter, in the first place, had been a precarious decision. His passion for painting had cost Dürer a secure career as goldsmith, for which his father had trained him up from the age of five. Dürer the Elder was devastated when his teenage son told him that he did not wish to take over the workshop but wished to switch careers. Young Albrecht loved the vibrant paintings in Nuremberg´s churches. The most ambitious of these were grand altarpieces with their complex compositions and great spiritual power in the age before the Reformation. The end of the Middle Ages was marked by intense piety and the expectation that great religious images could bring to life what they depicted and could spiritually heal. A painter was a therapist of sorts, a healer of souls through his union with God and Christ, in whose image mankind had been created.
Fast forward to 1509, when Dürer was in his late thirties. He had been brilliantly successful in making innovative printed images and in getting recognized. His prints sold down to Rome. He achieved praise for an altar-painting in Venice that demonstrated his mastery of colours. German scholars lauded him as equal to the Greek master painter Apelles. Working on a new commission—an altar-painting for a rich Frankfurt merchant—Dürer felt ever more frustrated. What a gap between his reputation and his lack of cash to buy a nice house, nice clothes, and food, and to simply ensure that he and his family felt financially secure. He put a portrait of himself right in the centre background of the painting. “Do you know what my living expenses are?”, he challenged the merchant.
The question remains meaningful. Some think of artists as aesthetes whose moral purity and vision should be bound up with being disinterest in money. The British contemporary artist Damien Hirst by contrast is well known for his commercial success and for being open about his wish to be rich. Why, he tells us in an interview, should artists suffer, like van Gogh? “I think it´s tragic,” he says, “that great artists die penniless.” Hirst thinks that Andy Warhol was the first to make it ok for artists to be commercially minded without appearing as a “sellout.” Hirst would admire Dürer if he went further back in time.
Dürer resisted dying penniless and mentally tormented—something which would happen to so many well and little-known artists who refused to play the art market in the Renaissance and supposed Golden Age of art that followed it. Adam Elsheimer, a pioneering German landscape artist in Rome around 1600 is a less well-known example; Jan Vermeer remains the most famous pre-modern artist whose own life and fortune of his small family ended in tragedy.
Dürer, by contrast, died a rich man—today he would be a millionaire. He saved up most of his assets, though, so strong was his need to feel financially secure after decades of living on loans for greater expenditures and paying in installments. Up to the end of his life, he accounted for pennies of expenditure, noting down when his wife bought a broom or he purchased cheap pigments made from red bricks. This was despite the fact that the couple had no children to leave an inheritance for.
Dürer´s late financial success came at a price though. Despite writing nine letters to the Frankfurt merchant in 1508 and 1509 to explain what was involved in painting an altarpiece well and would constitute a fair price, Dürer failed to achieve what he regarded as decent pay. The experience left him scarred, and the artist´s decision was radical: he would no longer take on commissions for new altarpieces. Imagine if a composer of complex symphonies, or a writer of novels, suddenly stopped work while at the top of their game. Understanding such transformative decisions opens a new window onto Dürer and his age when patterns of consumption and commerce changed. Succeeding as an artist meant experiencing losses and gains. The birth of the artist in the Renaissance was bound up with rich emotions and challenging adjustments to the rules of the market, even for the most established of artists. Dürer´s amazingly innovative prints, such as his “Melencolia I” in 1514, demonstrate that he never became a sell-out. Still, his life is full of questions for our own time and for an artist like Hirst—the first to go as far as giving collectors the choice of burning original paintings as they buy its version as a digital asset, an NFT. The NFT includes a hologram portrait of the artist. Dürer most likely would have approved.
Feature Image: Albrecht Dürer, ‘Self-portrait’, Museo Nacional del Prado. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
This curious drawing in the Royal Collection, attributed to William Hogarth but possibly by Phillipe Mercier, depicts a game of hazard, the ancestor of modern casino “craps.” An attribution to Mercier is supported by the figure of a young man wearing an order of chivalry (possibly the Garter, although the ribbon is worn over the wrong shoulder) who bears a strong resemblance to Mercier’s portraits of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Mercier was appointed painter to the Prince and Princess of Wales soon after the accession of George II allowed Frederick to set up his own household.
The staffage of the drawing is unusual, given the subject matter. Women as well as men sit at the hazard table, despite the strictures of Richard Steele that throwing dice was not ladylike. Even more remarkable is the clergyman who holds the dice box. Given the august company, he might be a bishop, and in fact, closely resembles Hogarth’s portrait of Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Salisbury and later of Winchester. There are not many circumstances that would explain how, in the words of Frances Burney, these individuals became so strangely situated.
One such is Twelfth Night, 5 January, as it was observed at court, when the sovereign, Royal Family, and courtiers played hazard for the benefit of the Groom Porter, the court official charged with procuring and dispensing small furnishings. Since these could include cards and dice, the Groom Porter was inextricably associated with games of chance at court, as the final authority, for example, on the rules of games. The drawing may be an unfinished sketch for a painting, never undertaken, to commemorate the revels of a particular Twelfth Night, that of January 1731, whence our story.
The years after the Hanoverian Succession saw a concerted effort to suppress gambling operations, such as tables for hazard and faro, conducted in taverns, coffeehouses, and other public accommodations in London and Westminster. Apart from any moral hazard they posed (and there were admonitions aplenty in print culture), the “silver tables” at Vanderman’s coffeehouse in Covent Garden or at the Phoenix tavern in the Haymarket were competition for the Government’s own gaming operations, the lotteries it used to fund public works, freeing up other revenue to bankroll an expanding military and naval establishment.
Spurred by Charles, second Viscount Townshend, holder of the office that evolved into the Home Secretary, the magistrates of Westminster (where most of these gambling parlors were housed) authorized raids on premises determined to be “common” (i.e. public) “gaming houses” open to all comers in violation of statute. The magistrates were thwarted, however, at every turn by resourceful, well-connected, and above all well-lawyered gambling entrepreneurs, as adept at gaming the system as they were at reaping the benefits that mathematical probability afforded them.
It did not help that gambling went forward with impunity at court, as the royal household was explicitly exempted from all legislation aimed at proscribing or regulating games of chance. Townshend deployed all of the powers of his office to support the prosecution of gaming operations, authorizing the Crown’s attorneys to defend constables at public expense when gaming entrepreneurs sued them, and funding rewards for those who informed on gaming operators. A widely circulated pamphlet recounting the efforts of the Westminster magistrates and the obstacles they faced apparently originated in Townshend’s office.
George I and (briefly) George II were evidently pressed to set an example, and for the decade of the 1720s, hazard was banished from the Twelfth Night revels in favor of ombre, a polite card game played for relatively low stakes. By the end of that decade, however, Townshend had fallen out with the Prime Minster, Sir Robert Walpole, who happened to be his brother-in-law, and by the spring of 1730, Townshend had resigned, returning to Raynham in Norfolk to promote the cultivation of turnips. Raids on gaming venues slowed dramatically, ceasing entirely by 1735. And no sooner was Townshend out of office than hazard immediately resumed on Twelfth Night at court, with the King, Queen, Prince of Wales, and the three princesses winning nearly a thousand guineas among themselves. Hazard continued as the game of preference as Twelfth Night was observed at court for at least the next decade, even after subsequent legislation outlawed it, along with basset and faro, as an illegal lottery.
The sketch in the Royal Collection certainly looks like a study for the sort of conversation piece for which Hogarth was particularly known, and which Mercier was known to have undertaken as well. Assuming that Twelfth Night of 1731 was the intended subject, there may have been any number of reasons that the project was abandoned. Newspaper reports of the revival of hazard at court festivities that week in January appeared in the same issues as accounts of raids on gaming venues; not long afterward, Captain William Bradbury, the recently ousted deputy to the Groom Porter Thomas Archer, wrote letters to newspapers threatening to expose his former employer. It was not the time to draw attention to this sort of courtly practice. What might seem to courtiers to be a harmless seasonal amusement might look to the public like insupportable hypocrisy.
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“Would you have a dried specimen of a world, or a pickled one?”
On 24 September 1843, the writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau recorded a fairly long critique of natural history museums in his journal. Best known for Walden (1854) and other environmental writings, it is not entirely surprising that Thoreau would have mixed feelings about museums, where plants, animals, and other objects were being rapidly accumulated to serve the study of science. “I hate museums,” he wrote. “They are the catacombs of nature…They are dead nature collected by dead men.” Describing a visit to the Boston Society of Natural History (the predecessor of the Museum of Science in Boston), he noted only a sense of detachment: “I walk amid those jars of bloated creatures which they label frogs, a total stranger, without the least froggy thought being suggested.”
Thoreau’s reflections are especially noteworthy as we mark International Museum Day this month. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) has declared a focus for 2023 on sustainability, well-being, and community. Noting the significant position of museums “as trusted institutions and important threads in our shared social fabric,” ICOM emphasizes their “transformative potential” for shaping larger conversations about climate change, global health, and other pressing issues. This year’s International Museum Day marks an opportunity, in ICOM’s words, to imagine the possibilities that museums can play “in shaping and creating sustainable futures.”
We can better understand what it might take for museums to create such futures by looking more closely at their past. The earliest museums were the cabinets of curiosities owned by early modern collectors. Often the product of an individual’s distinct interests, they included “natural and artificial curiosities” such as natural history specimens, works of art and other printed materials, and anthropological objects. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many early museums continued this vision, bringing together numerous kinds and categories of objects with the goal of promoting “useful knowledge” through the study and close examination of collections. The cases and cabinets filled with objects increasingly represented knowledge itself, seen in visual and tangible form. Their founders emphasized the value of studying material objects as a way to learn about numerous subjects. They imagined the “spark” that might result from studying objects, the new ideas that could emerge, and the exciting possibilities of placing different objects—and the minds of observers—in conversation.
“Thoreau’s dilemma highlights the ongoing question about how to use museum collections to explore and better understand our surrounding world.”
Around the time that Thoreau was professing his hatred of natural history museums, these institutions were undergoing major shifts in their purpose and scope. Some museums were moving in the direction of emphasizing education and expanding public access. Nonetheless, this was a fairly slow and somewhat mixed process. Many objects in museum collections were the direct result of colonial ventures and systems of exploitation, theft, and violence around the world. Labeled as “curiosities” by white collectors, they were used to promote inaccurate information and racist misconceptions. Even when museum galleries opened to a wider public, the authority to interpret objects still rested with elite white men. It was during this period that the term “scientist” was first coined, reflecting growing disciplinary specialization and professionalization within the scientific community. Nonetheless, many collections continued to combine numerous fields, bringing together works of art, natural history, anthropology, and more. Museums were undergoing a process of transformation, but it remained incomplete and reflected an uncertain future for these institutions.
Wandering amid the “jars of bloated creatures” in a museum gallery, Thoreau was not as distant from these collections as he claimed in writing. He donated numerous specimens to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and the Boston Society of Natural History, including fish, turtles, and birds’ eggs. He struggled with the ethics of his own scientific practices, seeking to balance between the close observation and “useful knowledge” afforded by stilled specimens and his preference for observing a living creature. In his journals, he often recorded lengthy descriptions of the turtles living near Walden Pond, marveling at their appearance and making detailed notes about their behavior. In addition to these writings, however, a turtle that he donated to the Museum of Comparative Zoology still remains suspended in alcohol in a glass jar, much like those he observed during his own visits to museums. Taken together, his writings and specimens show how he wrestled with different modes of studying his surrounding environment, recording his observations, and participating in broader scientific practices throughout his career.
As museums today look to expand their commitments to sustainability, well-being, and community, we can look to their history to understand both the challenges and possibilities of the work that lies ahead. Thoreau’s dilemma highlights the ongoing question about how to use museum collections to explore and better understand our surrounding world. At the same time, his criticisms perhaps unexpectedly reflect the kind of “spark” that museum founders once hoped to see resulting from the accumulated knowledge in their collections. Then and now, visitors to museums continue to play an important role in advocating for ethical practices and drawing connections to contemporary issues. As museums today imagine transformative change, they might continue to look to their own communities to participate in these broader conversations. In this way, “a dried specimen of a world” can continue to take on new life.
Feature image: London Natural History Museum by Kafai Liu. Public domain via Unsplash.
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