art history Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Were Elaborate Floor Mosaics More Common in Antiquity Than Today?

Ancient Greek and Roman wealthy homes often bore elaborate and beautiful floor mosaics, many of which depicted gods, heroes, and mythic and historical scenes in exquisite detail. Many such mosaics have survived to the present day, are displayed in museums and art collections all over the world, and are justly admired as great works of art.

Some people have recently wondered why floor mosaics were so popular in antiquity and why they are no longer as popular today as they were back then. In this post, I will attempt to answer this question. Along the way, we will take a deep dive into the ancient and modern economics of art and artistic labor.

Jesus Had a Vagina (According to Medieval Christian Mysticism)

About a month ago, a whole host of right-wing media outlets, including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, NBC Montana, and Fox News, published a flurry of wildly sensationalist articles claiming that a dean at the University of Cambridge said that Jesus was transgender. As Candida Moss, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity who is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, points out in this article she wrote for The Daily Beast, however, and as I will discuss further in the first section of this post, this claim is entirely false; the dean in question actually said no such thing.

At the center of this controversy, however, stands a very strange and fascinating fact, which is well known to scholars and students of medieval western European art and mysticism, but which is not well known to the general public. As bizarre and improbable as it may sound, medieval western European Christians frequently depicted the wound that Jesus is said to have received in his side on the cross in a manner closely resembling a vulva. Although scholars disagree about what exactly these depictions indicate, most agree that the medieval people who made them and venerated them were conscious of this resemblance. In this post, I will explore the history of these depictions and what they may tell us about late medieval gender and sexuality.

Why Is Justice Personified as a Woman Holding a Set of Scales?

Chances are at some point you’ve seen a statue or painting depicting the personification of the concept of justice as a woman holding a set of scales in one hand (usually her left) and an unsheathed sword in her other hand (usually her right), often wearing a blindfold over her eyes. Statues depicting Justice in this manner often stand outside courthouses across Europe and the Americas. Many people have wondered why she is personified as a woman and some have tried to attribute great allegorical or symbolic significance to her gender. Some have imagined, for instance, that maybe men find women desirable and men created the personification of Justice, so they made her a woman to show that Justice is desirable. This may sound like a compelling and common-sense answer, but it is still wrong.

In reality, Justice is personified as a woman not for any profound allegorical or symbolic reason, but rather simply because the respective nouns denoting the concept of “justice” in the Ancient Greek and Latin languages happen to be grammatically feminine. In this post, I will discuss the origin of the personification Justice and the history of how she came to have the standard iconography that she has today.

No, Xerxes I Was Not an Eight-Foot-Tall Giant

In the 2007 epic fantasy action film 300, cowritten and directed by Zack Snyder and based on the 1998 limited comic book series of the same name by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, Xerxes I, the king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, is portrayed by the Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro as a towering giant god-king who goes around almost completely nude, wearing only a very skimpy gold loincloth and a ton of really ornate gold jewelry, which is held on mostly through body piercings.

I’ve already written an entire post about how 300 is not historically accurate and it blatantly promotes a fascist, white supremacist message. Sadly, though, it has recently come to my attention that there are apparently some people on the internet who earnestly think that Xerxes I was really believed in antiquity to have been an eight-foot-tall giant.

Some have tried to prove this claim using a blatantly misquoted passage from the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) and Achaemenid relief carvings as evidence. In this post, I will show that Xerxes I was not really an eight-foot-tall giant, that Herodotos never claimed that he was an eight-foot-tall giant, and that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone in antiquity ever believed that he was one.

Why That Fresco from Pompeii Isn’t Sappho

It is extremely common for modern people to misidentify ancient portraits of random people as portraits of famous people. This is partly because many famous authors and historical figures who lived in the ancient world have no surviving portraits and people are eager to find images to represent them. This is especially often the case for ancient women. I will confess that I am partly guilty of this myself; I couldn’t find any decent images to represent Pamphile of Epidauros in my article I wrote about her back in July, so I used a photo of a bust of an unidentified woman in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, paired with a photo of the Ancient Theatre of Epidauros, in an effort to the represent the idea of an ancient Greek woman from Epidauros.

In this article, there is one particular ancient portrait that is especially widely misidentified as a portrait of a famous woman that I want to discuss. The portrait in question is a fresco. It depicts a woman with short, curly brown hair, a gold hairnet, gold earrings, and clothes that are dyed purple and green. She gazes directly at the viewer, holding a set of wax tablets bound with ribbons in her left hand and pressing a writing stylus to her lips with her right hand as though she were in thoughtful contemplation. It dates to between c. 50 and 79 CE and was discovered on 24 May 1760 in the Insula VI region of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

Classical scholars immediately began to speculate that the fresco might be a portrait of the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE), who is best known today for her poems about love and attraction between women and whose home island is the source for the contemporary word lesbian. (Whether Sappho herself was actually a lesbian is a subject I address in depth in this article I published in August 2021.) The fresco is currently held in the Naples National Archaeological Museum on the first floor in room seventy-six. It is still widely admired as a remarkable portrait of a literate ancient woman. Although the fresco is still widely circulated online as a supposed portrait of Sappho, art historians now generally agree that it actually depicts an unknown upper-class Pompeiian woman.

How Accurate Are “Photorealistic” Portraits of Roman Emperors?

In 2020, the digital artist Daniel Voshart used a neural net called Artbreeder to create a series of “photorealistic” portraits of fifty-four Roman emperors spanning from Augustus (ruled 27 BCE – 14 CE) to Carinus (who died in 285 CE). As the term “photorealistic” suggests, his portraits look almost like photographs. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not realize that these portraits are modern artistic impressions, not scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really historically looked like.

I’ve seen many people over the past year cite Voshart’s portraits and others like them as though they were authoritative, scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really looked like. In particular, I’ve noticed a worrying number of white supremacists trying to cite these kinds of portraits as “evidence” that the ancient Romans were all white. In this article I would like to discuss why Voshart’s portraits—and others like them—should be taken with several grains of salt.

Why Does Donald Trump Like Neoclassical Architecture So Much?

On 21 December 2020, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which officially establishes the Neoclassical architectural style as the “preferred” style for all United States federal buildings. The same executive order disparages Modernist architecture as “ugly and inconsistent.”

In practical terms, Trump’s executive order doesn’t mean much, since it only establishes the Neoclassical style as a “preferred” style and does not outright ban other styles. Moreover, the executive order is almost certainly going to go in the paper shredder as soon as President-Elect Joe Biden assumes office on 20 January 2021.

Nonetheless, the fact that Trump apparently felt strongly enough about Neoclassical architecture to issue an executive order on the subject right before he leaves office raises all sorts of interesting questions about what Neoclassical architecture represents in a modern political context and why a man like Donald Trump would devote time to enshrine it as a “preferred style” for anything.

No, the Black Death Did Not Cause the Renaissance

With the world still mired in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, as of the time I am writing this, has already killed roughly 1.25 million people worldwide, optimists have written a whole flurry of op-eds trying to put a positive spin on this pandemic. They have tried to insist that the Black Death somehow caused the Renaissance and that COVID-19 may therefore result in a new Renaissance that will carry our world to new and even greater heights than ever before.

This argument, however, is loaded with fallacies and false assumptions. For one thing, there are legitimate reasons for thinking that the Renaissance may not have been such a good thing as it is often made out to be. Furthermore, while the Renaissance did come after the Black Death, but it would be a grave mistake to assume that the Black Death therefore caused it to happen.

Stolen Artworks in Museums

When most people today think of stolen artworks, they usually tend to think of artifacts being stolen from museums. There are many famous cases of this, such as the notorious theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in 1911, which generated international headlines. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the fact that many of the artifacts that are currently on display in museums in western Europe and North America were themselves stolen from the peoples of other countries all around the world.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, western Europeans and people of western European descent pillaged countries all over the world, taking their cultural artifacts and putting them in museums back in their home countries, where they could admire them, but the peoples of the countries to whom the artifacts rightfully belonged could not. There are so many stolen artworks on display in museums that it would be impossible for me to cover them all, but today I want to talk about just a few of the more famous examples.

Where Does the Myth of Medusa Come From?

Medusa is one of the most fascinating figures in classical mythology and one who bears a deep contemporary resonance. Indeed, just yesterday, it was announced that a controversial statue of her would be installed in Collect Pond Park in New York City. In order to understand this statue and the controversy surrounding it, we need to talk about the bizarre and fascinating history of how the Medusa myth has evolved over the past 2,800 years or so.

The story about Medusa that most people today are familiar with holds that she was once an extraordinarily beautiful mortal woman, but then she was raped by the god Poseidon in the temple of the goddess Athena. Athena was disgusted by the desecration of her temple, so she cursed Medusa, giving her snakes for hair and making it so that anyone who saw her face would be instantly turned to stone. Then, eventually, the hero Perseus came along and beheaded her.

This story, however, is actually radically different from the story the ancient Greeks were familiar with. In the oldest surviving sources for the Medusa myth, she is seemingly born a Gorgon with the ability to turn people to stone at a glance, she is never raped by Poseidon, and she is never cursed by Athena. Oh, and she apparently also had the four-legged lower body of a horse.