One small step for man, four giant leaps toward eternity

Artemis II’s recent journey around the moon and the stunning images taken by the astronauts made me wonder. The result is this story about four ‘messages in a bottle’, the Pioneer plaques and the Voyager Golden Records, from an art historian’s point of view.

In past stories, we used a virtual time machine to travel the world and the past. The farthest we traveled was in a museum, as far back as 500 million years. This time, we travel distances that are beyond imagination. For example, Voyager 1, nearly fifty years into its odyssey, is 15.78 billion miles from Earth.

Artemis II’s crew achieved the furthest distance ever traveled by humans, with a ten-day journey. If Artemis II’s journey is one step, then Voyager is 6 million steps ahead.

Another way to make sense of the distance is that while you have just done one step in New York, Voyager is in San Francisco, about to cross the Pacific Ocean. So, hold on tight, dear reader, as this story takes us into the unimaginable expanse of the universe.

Harvesting human genius toward one goal

We start the journey with the pyramids of Egypt. Whenever I hear someone doubting that Egyptians could even build such colossal monuments 4,500 years ago, I always respond, “Look at JFK and NASA.” The same can be said about Roman monuments or medieval cathedrals.

From where I stand, History, good and bad, is steered by a few men. The Egyptian peasant did not dream of pyramids; a Pharaoh did. Even if Pharaoh had tens of thousands of peasants at his disposal, he also needed great minds to help him make his vision a reality.

Enter Imhotep, the genius architect of the first colossal stone monument ever built, the Step Pyramid. In this story, Pharaoh Djoser is JFK, and Imhotep is NASA. In the short-term attention span of our times, Kennedy’s speech is reduced to:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

That’s not all he said. Unlike an Egyptian King who could do as he pleased, JFK was trying to get Congress’ approval to spend money on one bold idea. Crucially, he explained that the resources to go to the moon were not just financial, but human:

We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.

In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation.

A human adventure, not just a technical challenge

While giving the figures of the staggering sums needed, JFK still reiterated that it was beyond money:

New objectives and new money cannot solve these problems. They could, in fact, aggravate them further—unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space.

Pyramids, cathedrals, and space adventures exist because not only one politician decided so, but because, from the Egyptian or French peasant to NASA’s technician, people believed in the mission.

The Egyptian peasant had faith in the divinity of Pharaoh, and the French peasant hoped the cathedral would help secure the salvation of his soul. With JFK and NASA, it was a different kind of belief, asking taxpayers and engineers to dream big.

Like it was with Imhotep and the cathedral architects, there was a perfect set of circumstances: the political will, the talent, and the blank cheque to turn an ambitious idea into reality. Eight years after JFK’s speech, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Three years to design, build, and launch Pioneer

A few months before the moon landing, a seemingly less impressive decision was made in haste. There was an opportunity to catch, now or never, a rare planet alignment that offered a free sling into the vast universe.

To understand the ‘slingshot effect’ urgency, Artemis II benefited from one by being slung back toward Earth. That was the opposite goal: to catch a far bigger slingshot, with Jupiter as the launchpad to catapult probes far into the universe.

No pressure, there were just three years for NASA to design, build, and launch Pioneer 10 and the following year Pioneer 11 into space.

A chance encounter three weeks before launch sparked the idea to send a message to eternity

Now, if three years to design and launch a spacecraft feels like intolerable pressure, what about three weeks? Yes, three weeks between the idea of adding a message to the spacecraft and the launch. Here is what happened.

While looking through the porthole as Pioneer was getting tested, the exact view in the photo above, a British science journalist named Eric Burgess got a lightbulb moment. What about adding a message to the first human object to leave our Solar System?

Burgess shared the idea with other journalists present that day in California, and all were enthusiastic. And by a complete accident of fate, only one hour drive away, Dr. Carl Sagan was visiting a lab for a completely different mission. He had just done a conference, along with Dr. Frank Drake, to share their designs for a message that might be used to communicate with an alien intelligence.

The decision was taken in no time, as the launch was in three weeks! Three people were involved in designing the message: Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, and Frank Drake.

Launching message bottles into the cosmic ocean: the Pioneer Plaques

The plaque was meant to convey where and when the spacecraft originated from, and who built it. Carl Sagan explained the rationale behind the couple:

The original drawings of this couple were made by my wife and were based upon the classical models of Greek sculpture and the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci.

Sagan explained that we inherited the wisdom of the Greeks, and that Leonardo was both an artist and a scientist.

Sagan did not mention the drawing above, but it is hard to believe this is not the one he thought of. But what is it about? It is an architectural drawing. Yes, only one art book from Antiquity survived the tragic loss of knowledge at the end of Antiquity. That one surviving book is authored by Vitruvius, and it’s called ‘On Architecture’.

That sketch illustrates Vitruvius’ explanation that the proportions of architecture are modeled on those of man.

Why Man and Woman are naked?

As for nudity, both in the Pioneer plaque and Leonardo’s drawing, there is a lot more to say. When Linda Salzman Sagan drew inspiration from classical Greek sculpture, she may well have had the sculpture below in mind.

Now, why did the ancient Greeks represent figures of man and gods in the nude? The first answer is their ideal of kalos kagathos. Kalos means beautiful, and agathos means good.

In plain English, the outer beauty reflects the inner virtue. A healthy mind resides within a healthy body, expressed by the grace and symmetry of the naked form.

Second, Plato wrote about the gymnasium, a word that means ‘place to be naked’. It is a conversation about whether it is disgraceful or not to have women exercising in the nude, and the response is:

It is not long since the Greeks thought it disgraceful and ridiculous, as most of the barbarians do now, for men to be seen naked.

That’s Plato quoting Socrates, two of the great thinkers of mankind. The argument is that when nude, man and woman are taking on the clothing of virtue. That barbarians find nudity disgraceful. For the rational mind, there is nothing shameful about the human figure.

To understand further why nudity was more than appropriate for a message to the universe, we have Rodin’s take:

Man’s naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.

Wear clothes and belong to a specific time, place, and role in society. To become eternal, one needs to discard one’s clothes and reveal the universal, what mankind looks like.

The Voyager Golden Records, humanity’s time capsule

While the Pioneer Plaques were akin to postcards, the next idea was far more ambitious. A time capsule, a snapshot of who we are, what we humans sound like, and the sounds of nature. A record with a selection of musical pieces, as varied as drums to Louis Armstrong and Mozart.

Photos were included, like this example below:

Now, consider the pyramids of Egypt, which are a paltry 4,500 years of age. And contemplate how many monuments and artworks were conceived to last eternity, and which will likely make it there.

The answer is four small objects: the two Pioneer Plaques and the two Golden Records. In Murmurs of the Earth, the creators of the record explain:

Billions of years from now, our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder.

But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished—perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds—on the distant planet Earth.

The two Voyager spacecraft will keep traveling the silent immensity of space without any help. And the gold records are built to last, containing an ultra-pure sample of Uranium-238, which has a half-life of 4.468 billion years.

Of all humanity’s achievements, from colossal pyramids to music, all that will exist in billions of years is four tiny metal plaques.

Pioneer and Voyager, four messages in a bottle journeying into the vastness of space and eternity

Although Cassini took the magnificent photo above, it mimics a lesser quality image taken by Voyager 1, at Sagan’s request. Why not turn the spacecraft back toward Earth for a last view of our planet?

That faint blue speck is us, Planet Earth. Apparently, the only habitable ship for humans, animals, and plants within a vast and cold universe. Which puts all the wars on each other and on our planet in perspective, doesn’t it?

If there is no light pollution where you live, put on Dark Was the Night by Blind Willie Johnson tonight, and look at the stars.

One of the bright lights out there may be one of the four Moments of Wonder disappearing far into their interstellar journey toward eternity.

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Sources

A Message from Earth; Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan and Frank Drake; Science, Feb. 25, 1972, New Series, Vol. 175, No. 4024 (Feb. 25, 1972), American Association for the Advancement of Science

Pioneer: First to Jupiter, Saturn, and Beyond; NASA SP-446; Richard O. Fimmel, James Van Allen, and Eric Burgess, 1980.

Carl Sagan, Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, 1973.

Plato, The Republic, V-452.

Anthony Mario Ludovici, Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin, 1912.

Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, Carl Sagan, Frank D. Drake, Jon Lomberg, Linda Salzman Sagan, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris (1978).

Moments of Wonder

Museums are time machines going back 500 million years

How far back in time can we go in a museum…

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5 months ago · 11 likes · Moments of Wonder

Nadar, a dozen visionaries squeezed into one man

A man like Nadar could never have been invented by a Hollywood script writer, even with the help of psychotic drugs. Above, in this self-portrait, at a time when photography was barely 25 years old, he attempts a ‘photosculpture.’

The twelve poses reflect Nadar’s multiple facets: a writer, journalist, caricaturist, scientist, secret agent, photography pioneer, balloon flight pioneer, who visited the moon (at least in fiction), and an entrepreneur. Bonus points for the walk-on part in the story of the birth of Impressionism.

Nadar was born Félix Tournachon in 1820. His real name, filtered by Parisian slang, became Tournadar, shortened into Nadar.

Nadar was also a brand and a family of creative geniuses. This story is about Félix Nadar, the flying photographer. So, dear reader, hold on tight as we climb aboard Nadar’s hot-air balloon.

Nadar, the caricaturist

Nadar had, by his early 30s, already experienced hard labor in a German prison, as Nadarsky, trying to fight for Polish independence. He returned for a fruitless attempt at spying on Russians, then earned his living with his pen as a journalist and famous caricaturist.

A sure sign of intelligence is to be able to laugh at oneself, so above we have a self-portrait of Nadar dangling up in the air from a balloon.

As we will see, Nadar was a pioneer in both the fields of photography and human flight. Let’s start with the talent for which he is most famous, photography.

Nadar elevated portrait photography to art

In 1857, photography was barely 20 years old, and a very long way from being accepted as an art form in its own right. And here we have Nadar brushing away the ‘mechanical reproduction’ of photographic portraiture:

Photographic theory can be learned in one hour, and the first notions of practice in one day. What cannot be learned, I tell you, is the feeling of light, the artistic appreciation of the effects produced by varied days combined.

What can be taught even less is the spiritual intelligence of your subject, that intuitive touch which puts you in communion with the model and allows you to provide, not an indifferent physical reproduction within reach of the lowliest lab assistant, but the most familiar and favorable likeness: the intimate resemblance.

This is the psychological side of photography; the word doesn’t seem too ambitious to me.

Quite the statement, and worth contemplating how valid it is 170 years later.

Nadar, the photography pioneer: electrical light, underground, and balloon photography

Just after Nadar told us that photography technique can be learned in a day, it is also worth recounting how much of a pioneer he was. He is most famous for his portraits, which were taken with natural light.

Nadar was a restless polymath and author of several milestones in the new technology of photography: the first aerial photos, above Paris, in 1858. Imagine the noxious gases escaping above his head, to prevent the balloon exploding, which had the effect of ‘burning’ the photos...

Then, he used electrical light in both portrait photography and underground, in the sewers and catacombs of Paris.

Nadar became a brand, and he built and opened a photo studio a stone’s throw from the future Opéra Garnier, below.

With a great talent for publicity, the facade was decorated with a ‘Nadar’ brightly lit red sign. The studio relied on sunlight, but to avoid cooking the clients posing in summer, an ingenious air-conditioning system was created, using double-glazed windows sprayed with water to cool down the interior.

If that sounds fiendishly complex and expensive, it was. In 1874, Nadar moved out and rented the space. A motley band of painters, tired of being constantly rejected by the official Salon, rented the studio.

Their names? Monet, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Cézanne, Degas, and many more. That was the ‘walk-on part’ in the history of the birth of Impressionism, as it is in Nadar’s studio that the movement got its name.

Nadar, a cornerstone of aviation history

It’s been eighty years since the Montgolfier brothers were the first humans to go up in the air. It may sound obvious to us, in an age of jumbo jets, that the solution to human flight is to be heavier than air, but we are in 1863.

Nadar created a company to promote aerial locomotion with heavier-than-air devices. Below is his photo of a prototype of a steam-powered helicopter.

He financed the Giant, the world’s largest hot-air balloon, at nearly 200 ft in height. It definitely was heavier than air, with a two-story basket able to carry up to 15 people, with a photographic dark room and a printing press...

The French word for daredevil is casse-cou, literally meaning ‘break neck’, which is what almost happened to Nadar, his wife, and the Giant’s passengers. The flight was successful in that the hot-air balloon flew to Germany, but it ended in a nasty crash and numerous injuries.

Flying from a balloon to the moon

You probably heard of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and its author, Jules Verne. He also wrote From the Earth to the Moon, in the 1860s, one hundred years before NASA succeeded at sending men to the moon. And Jules Verne wrote about a rocket launch from Florida, in a rocket that returns on Earth by splashdown...

One of the three persons in the journey is Michel Ardan, an anagram of Nadar. The engraving above leaves little doubt that a real restless polymath, Nadar, is the inspiration for the mad genius of fiction.

So, at least on paper, Nadar went as far as the moon! See, you cannot make this up. Of course, there is more.

The first postal and reconnaissance flight

The Prussians, soon to be Germans, blockaded, bombed, and starved Paris in 1870. And what did Nadar do? At his own expense, he created the Compagnie des Aérostatiers to fly a balloon from Montmartre.

It was the first reconnaissance flight in history, as well as the first airmail service, as Nadar’s balloon carried letters so that starving Parisians could send news to their families behind enemy lines.

Nadar had several balloons made during the siege, so his many ventures up in the air should be regarded as the birth of aviation, 45 years before the Wright brothers.

A Giant balloon that crashed, financing new techniques and balloons during the siege of Paris, it should not come as a surprise to learn that Nadar, a restless genius juggling with debts, was brought down to earth by bankruptcy not long after the Prussian war.

Nadar returned to a career as a photographer, with another world’s first in store.

Nadar and the first photographic interview

In 1886, Nadar produced the first photography interview ever published, of Eugène Chevreul, on his 100th birthday. The great chemist was also the scientist whose work on the theory of color had an immense influence on painting, and the Impressionists in particular.

Would you agree, dear reader, that even if a script writer had dreamt up such a character, no producer would ever finance an unbelievable story?

Now we have set the stage for Nadar’s genius, to conclude our Moment of Wonder, let’s peer into the spiritual intelligence of some of Nadar’s models.

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Sources

The majority of the photos are courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France / Gallica.

Mémoire à Consulter et consultation pour Félix Tournachon dit Nadar Contre Adrien Tournachon jeune et compagnie, Cour impériale de Paris, 1857, translated by the author.

The word Queen doesn’t even exist in the ancient Egyptian language

With ‘Talk like an Egyptian’, we’ve already discovered the cultural misunderstanding behind using Greek words for Egypt. We still say Pharaohs were buried inside gigantic pastries (pyramids), and that coffins were supposed to eat flesh (sarcophagus means ‘flesh-eater)...

Here, we burst the myth of the great Queens of Egypt, with a simple but powerful realization: there was not even a word for Queen. There was only ever a King’s wife, a King’s Mother, and a King’s daughter for a princess. However powerful she may have been, a lady was always a ‘plus one’.

It is not like relegating a woman to being her husband’s ‘plus one’ is a thing of the past. In the Musée d’Orsay, a masterpiece by Renoir is still titled ‘Madame Georges Charpentier’, her husband’s name. She only exists as the accessory, yet she was called Marguerite, merci.

So we are entering a time machine and traveling across three millennia along the Nile. While up to 350 people sat on the throne of Egypt, worry not, it is going to be an interminable story. You only need one hand, dear reader, to count how many stops we need.

Yes, at best, only five women sat on the throne as Pharaohs of Egypt. This is their story.

What is a Pharaoh, to begin with?

Forget about the word per-aa, Pharaoh, which means ‘big house’, as it only started being used long into the three millennia of Pharaonic history. The first rulers of the lands along the Nile, over 5,000 years ago, were called Horus.

Yes, Horus, the falcon god. They were the incarnation of the god who inherited the Earth from the dawn of time. The illustration above, one of the earliest royal inscriptions of Pharaonic Egypt, is almost 5,000 years old and is easy to read: there are only three hieroglyphs.

The falcon is Horus, the snake is the name, Snake, and the walls represent a royal palace. So, it reads Horus Snake, as plain as reading King Louis.

The title of the person on the throne of Egypt is always masculine

All the words used to describe the ruler, Lord of the Two Lands, He of the Sedge and the Bee, and He of the Two Ladies (the vulture and cobra goddesses), master, majesty, and so on, imply a man.

Oh, and the person seated on the throne was not only the son of the gods, but he was also a good god.

In plain English, take a Pope, a King, a general, the owner of all the land, someone who is the son of gods, and the living presence of Horus, the god-king, all rolled into one, and you have a Pharaoh.

An important little trick to know is how to turn a masculine word into a feminine one. Take the duck, which you read SA, and means ‘son’. Add a loaf of bread hieroglyph, a T, and SAT becomes ‘daughter’.

And since a Pharaoh was partly human and partly divine, the word for god was netjer. And if you add the T of the feminine, it becomes netjeret, ‘goddess’.

What is the difference between a King’s Wife and a Female Pharaoh?

Look at an ancient Egyptian statue, and it is not exactly difficult to work out whether the figure is male or female. But as we try to understand the difference between ‘King’s Wife’ and a Pharaoh who happens to be a lady, we must discuss grammar.

That little piece of bread hieroglyph is not a detail at all, as we are about to discover.

Before meeting the few Female Kings of Egypt, we need to take stock of how much of Egypt’s history has vanished. The best example is Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, the biggest stone monument ever built.

What do we know of his life story? Nothing. Absolutely nothing is known of Khufu, the person and his achievements, beyond that immense pyramid and one tiny ivory statuette representing the mighty Pharaoh.

That’s the challenge, combing through the Sahara desert sand, in search of fragments, where one or two hieroglyphs make the difference between hundreds of ‘King’s Wifes’ and a handful of Female Pharaohs.

Merneith, the first female ruler of the ancient world?

The couple of hieroglyphs missing is precisely the issue for candidate number one, Merneith, who was a King’s Wife at the time of the Horus Snake we saw earlier.

Abydos is one of the most important sites of Egypt, where the first Kings were buried. Petrie, the great Egyptologist, found a royal tomb there in 1900. The inscriptions and the size of the tomb meant he assumed that it was a King’s tomb.

To make his and our lives more difficult, it is worth remembering that these inscriptions are about 5,000 years old, and these are early hieroglyphs. Today, knowing it is a feminine name, we would read it Merytneith, (she) beloved by the goddess Neith. Note the addition of the missing T that turns the name feminine.

And there is more. She had not one tomb, but two. A very potent piece of evidence is that she is named on the Palermo stone, one of the rare and highly important lists of Kings of Egypt...

Frustratingly, the stone is broken precisely at her name... Underneath is another royal inscription, this time her name is written on the right, next to King Snake, but it is written Mut Nysut (King’s mother), so Merneith, mother of King Djet (the Horus Snake we saw earlier).

Above is another piece of evidence, her name written alongside that of Kings, but as Merneith, King’s Mother.

Being present on King’s list implies that she may have been more than a King’s Mother, but, lacking a ‘smoking hieroglyph’ writing in plain Egyptian that she was the King of Egypt, we cannot be sure if Merneith was the first female ruler of History.

Khentkaus I

Our time machine got stuck in the sands of Abydos, 5,000 years ago. We now fly 500 years into the future, in Giza, near the ‘smaller’ of the three pyramids.

Enter candidate number two, Khentkawes. There are far more than three tombs in Giza, but thousands, from colossal to minuscule. One step tomb was so big that some early archeologists called it ‘the fourth pyramid’.

Its owner is known very clearly by the inscription above the door, below:

The inscription, as visible above, ends with her name, Khentkaus. The top of the inscription is repeated above to help answer the question: King’s mother, or King?

The translation above is clear; line 1 means King, and line 2 means Mother of the King. But, a very big but, there are two ways to read the inscription. One means she is King, the other, ‘Mother of the two Kings’.

Unfortunately, our time machine is only poetic, and because we cannot ask a scribe from 4,500 years ago to clarify the subtleties of ancient hieroglyphs, we are still stuck in the sand.

Was Khentkaus a Female King or a King’s Mother? We don’t know.

Neferu Sobek, the first Female Pharaoh

Drum roll: that grammatical navigation was to ensure our time machine landed in the right time and place. We are now around 3,800 years into the past, and have found the few fragments that reveal who the first Female Pharaoh was.

Look at the photo on the left. Even broken, you see the nemes headcloth that only Pharaohs wear. Her bust and dress tell you she is a woman. Her belt tells you her name. As it is easier to read with the seal on the right, let’s do that now.

Like a small version of the Horus Snake inscription, we have Horus, a name, and a royal palace. The tiny but mighty difference is the loaf of bread, a T, after the falcon. It is a she falcon, a Female Horus!

Now, her name: three signs, the sun, Ra, a hoe, Mr (beloved), and another piece of bread, which reads Meret Ra. The other side mentions her other name, Neferu Sobek.

In plain Egyptian, Female Horus, Meret Ra, Lady of the Two Lands, (she) beloved of Ra, Daughter of Ra, Neferu Sobek. That’s how much difference a little loaf of bread makes. Neferu Sobek was not a King’s Wife, but a Female King.

Pharaoh Neferusobek had a short reign; little is known about her, but, significantly, she was not depicted as a male. There was no room for interpretation; she was depicted as female and used the feminine for her title, that of the first woman Pharaoh of Egypt.

The Queen who became Pharaoh, Hatshepsut

We now follow the breadcrumbs through the sands in search of more loaves of bread next to that of Kings’ names. On television, you see documentaries about Queen Hatshepsut.

She was indeed, for a time, a Queen, which, as you know, means ‘King’s Wife’ Hatshepsut. But one day, she made a bold move. Pharaoh Thutmose III was still too young to rule, and she was nobody’s wife. That lady, whose name, Hatshepsut, means ‘Foremost of the noble ladies’, was not content being a ‘plus one’.

She wanted more, so she did something unprecedented, and more astonishing than adding a few Ts here and there. Remember, there was a Pharaoh already.

It is not like she sat on an empty throne while no one was watching; it was a conscious move, becoming a Female King, meaning there were two Pharaohs, one called Hatshepsut, the other Thutmose III.

The great Champollion, who visited her magnificent temple in Luxor, wrote :

I was surprised, reading inscriptions, to realize they talked about that bearded King, in usual Pharaoh attire, employing words and verbs in the feminine, as it was about a Queen.

Champollion, the first person able to read hieroglyphs in 1,400 years, had good reasons to be surprised. The female, bearded Pharaoh in question had been thoroughly erased from the record, as visible above, her name, on the left, was chiseled.

Pharaoh Neferneferuaten

The short period when Amenhotep IV and his Great King’s Wife, Nefertiti, reformed religion is fascinating. But it is important to realize that once more, it had been intentionally erased, which is worth a future story.

Suffice to say, you are aware already, dear reader, of a famous Queen named Nefertiti. As, by now, you do realize the importance of looking at tiny breadcrumbs through the sand of Egypt, then let’s discuss the name of the famous Queen for one minute.

Her name was not Nefertiti. It was Nefer neferu Aten Neferet Iti, which means ‘Beautiful are the Beauties of Aten, the Beautiful one has come’. Which is why Nefertiti is easier to pronounce!

Now, notice the first part of that name, Nefer neferu Aten. It happens to be the name of a Pharaoh who reigned after Akhenaten and just before young Tutankhamun became Pharaoh.

See where this is going? Digging through the sand, a few pieces tell us about a Pharaoh whose name was Nefer neferu Aten akhet en hyes, the same name plus “effective for her husband.”

Nefer Neferu Aten was a Female Pharaoh, probably Nefertiti, although very little is known about that King.

Now, our time machine did five stops indeed, but only three of the ladies we witnessed were with certainty Female Pharaohs, even when we know little about Neferusobek and Neferneferuaten. There are two further candidates on the list of Female Pharaohs, Tausret and Cleopatra VII.

If you did enjoy this time travel already, then the time machine will pursue the exploration to reveal more about Tausret, Pharaoh Cleopatra, and whatever fascinating bread crumbs we find in the Egyptian desert.

In the meantime, I trust that realizing that a single loaf of bread changed a woman's role from ‘King’s Wife’ to Female Pharaoh was a Moment of Wonder.

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Sources

William M. Flinders Petrie, The royal tombs of the first dynasty (Part I): 1900.

Selim Hassan Excavations at Giza (1932–1933). Vol. 4.

Champollion le jeune, Lettres écrites d’Égypte et de Nubie, Quinzième lettre, 18 Juin 1829, translated by the author.

Moments of Wonder

Talk like an Egyptian

Two millennia spent seeing ancient Egypt through a Greek lens…

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23 days ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Moments of Wonder

Mona Lisa wore a mustache even before she was stolen

Mona Lisa’s journey as a lady sporting a mustache started long before being stolen, as the first sighting of a bearded Mona Lisa was recorded in a French newspaper in 1870.

Why did caricaturists pick on her? Of the thousands of masterpieces in the Louvre that they could choose from, why this one? Is it because she is the only Renaissance portrait that smiles, and one of a handful of smiling faces in the biggest museum in the world?

What is certain is that it was one seemingly innocuous decision, protecting the painting with a glass cover, that put her on track for a stratospheric rise to fame and to become the subject of countless pranks and memes.

The Louvre employed outside workers to put glass in front of most masterpieces. In 1910, one of them, a man with a mustache, was entrusted with adding protective glass to the smiling lady.

He was poor and dreamt of becoming rich.

Man with a mustache steals the Mona Lisa

Vincenzo Peruggia, a competent decorator painter, was entrusted to work as a contractor for a glazier company commissioned by the Louvre Museum to protect its paintings.

That is how he got to change the glass of the box-like frame that supposedly protected the Mona Lisa. As he knew the Louvre like the back of his hand, one summer of 1911, he tried his hand at gaining a great fortune.

Dressed in a worker’s white smock, he just walked through the employees’ door and made his way to the Italian masterpieces section. He planned to shove a painting under that smock, only to realize that it would not fit.

On the spur of the moment, he realized that the painting next to it, that of a lady smiling at him, was just about the size of his blouse. As he knew exactly how to open it, in no time, the man with a mustache hid the smiling lady under his coat.

The image of Mona Lisa with a mustache above is a caricature of a Louvre guard seeing his own reflection in masterpieces.

Peruggia was no great mastermind, but he was bold and extremely lucky. He found a painting the same size as his blouse. One door stopped his exit, but an employee kindly unlocked it for him.

Once in the courtyard, there was still the main door leading to the street. It was open, its guard was nowhere to be seen, so the man with a mustache found himself in the street with Mona Lisa under his blouse.

Steal the Mona Lisa? It’s like thinking someone could steal the towers of Notre-Dame!

This time Mona Lisa has a full beard, that of Théophile Homolle, then director of the Louvre, who boasted to the press:

Steal the Mona Lisa? It’s like thinking someone could steal the towers of Notre-Dame!

One imagines he regretted his overconfidence when his summer holiday was ruined by a phone call: the towers of Notre-Dame were still standing, but the Mona Lisa was missing.

L.H.O.O.Q, Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee

Another seemingly simple act: Marcel Duchamp took a cheap postcard of la Joconde, as she is known in French, and drew a mustache, a goatee, and the letters L.H.O.O.Q.

Which means nothing in French, until you read it out loud. The polite translation is “there is fire down below”, but in reality, it is a crude but funny pun.

And not the first time that Mona Lisa was satirized, as visible below, in a 1887 caricature of the Mona Lisa smoking a pipe.

Why did Duchamp add a mustache and goatee to the Mona Lisa? Who was he laughing at, the painting? The fame? Or something altogether different?

A painter with a mustache enters the conversation, Salvador Dali

Before Marcel Duchamp got a chance to explain his gesture fully, Salvador Dali made a joke about the joke. He had his face added to that of the Mona Lisa, as well as the gold coins Mona Lisa holds (in another version, she holds banknotes).

Ten years later, the shaven Mona Lisa travelled to Washington DC and New York, then Tokyo and Moscow.

When in New York, on the busiest day, visitors who had queued outside for hours in the blizzard had an average of four seconds to look at the smiling woman. The size of the disappointment is one of the reasons why there are two Mona Lisas today.

One is the fame, and, underneath, the painting. So, is adding a pipe, a mustache, or a beard to the Mona Lisa laughing at the painting, or is it a lot deeper than this?

What did Duchamp mean by adding a mustache to Mona Lisa?

Marcel Duchamp drew the mustache in 1919, the 400th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death. But 1919 was just after the First World War, during which a revolutionary art movement called Dada was born.

Let’s hear now Marcel explaining, forty years later, why he put that mustache on Mona Lisa’s face:

In 1919, when Dada was in full blast, and we were demolishing many things, the Mona Lisa became a prime victim. I put a mustache and a goatee on her face simply with the idea of desecrating it.

And that it was a reaction to the war:

We were also very pacifist. We saw the stupidity of the war. We were in a position to judge the results, which were no results at all. Our movement was another form of pacifist demonstration.

So, that mustache’s meaning was a lot more than being a prank. Four hundred years apart, there is a direct link between Duchamp and Leonardo, as both artists agreed on what painting is about.

Looking at a painting with one’s mind instead of one's eyes

Leonardo da Vinci lived in the age of the craftsman, trying to elevate himself to the status of artist. Duchamp is the artist who stated that art was whatever the artist decided it was.

So, a little game for you, dear reader. Guess who said what below, one statement is by Leonardo, the other by Duchamp:

Painting should not be only retinal or visual; it should have to do with the gray matter of our understanding, not alone the purely visual.

If you say that sciences are not mechanical but cerebral, I say to you that painting is cerebral.

The grey matter quote was Duchamp, and the cerebral one Leonardo da Vinci, saying that painting is a thing of the mind.

In the caricature above, Leonardo is shown photographing Lisa del Giocondo. Human eyes will forever be more powerful than any camera, as they have a fancy processor, the human brain.

And on that, Duchamp and Leonardo da Vinci were on the same wavelength. In fact, Duchamp meant to tickle one’s brain with Mona Lisa’s mustache.

And there is another link between the two, in that Leonardo very much could take a joke.

A painter with a beard sketched Monna Vanna, or the ‘nude Mona Lisa’

Now the joke here is that while we do know with near certainty who the Mona Lisa is, what about her twin, the ‘nude Mona Lisa’?

It is a cartoon, a drawing on paper that a painter sketches in preparation for a painting. Assistants then pierce the cartoon like a connect-the-dot style outline, so the master’s sketch can be transferred to a painting.

Leonardo da Vinci never signed his works. Known as ‘Monna Vanna’, this puzzling sketch has long been accepted by specialists as being from Leonardo’s workshop, but the big question has always been, was it by his hand, or his assistants?

In 2017, the sketch, which is almost the same size as the Mona Lisa, underwent a thorough study. And it was discovered that a left-hander drew parts of the sketch. To art historians, it was like the sky opened, and the birds sang in unison: drawn by Leonardo da Vinci’s hand, as Leonardo was left-handed.

In any case, the other clue was the quality of the drawing. Even with his assistant’s modifications, this is a Leonardo drawing of a ‘nude Mona Lisa’, although we do not know anything about whom or what it is supposed to represent.

Leonardo sketched it in Rome, while he was brushing shoulders with Michelangelo and Raphael. He was not a dour old man; in his 60s, he amused himself with the practical jokes he pulled on friends.

The ‘nude Mona Lisa’ was sketched by a painter with a beard who could make and take a joke.

The two Mona Lisas, the mustachioed myth and the masterpiece

Which brings us back to the two Mona Lisas. Is it ok to draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa? On the myth, absolutely. On the painting, not at all.

Desecrating it, as Duchamp said he did with the moustache, is in throwing rocks, acid, paint, or soup at the painting.

Desecrating it is when ‘archaeologists’ dug tombs in a Florentine convent in the hope of finding Monna Lisa del Giocondo's remains for their fifteen minutes of fame.

Marcel Duchamp, the very man who gave her a mustache, wondered about the cost of Mona Lisa’s fame:

The poor Mona Lisa is gone because no matter how wonderful her smile may be, it’s been looked at so much that the smile has disappeared.

I believe that when a million people look at a painting, they change the thing by looking alone. Physically.

Duchamp said this just before Lisa travelled to Washington, D.C., and New York. Since that journey, nearly 400 million people have looked at that smile.

Duchamp is wrong about the disappearance of Mona Lisa’s smile. She indeed suffocates under the massive weight of fame, having to shelter from flashlights and physical assaults behind bulletproof glass.

Yet, glowing in that temperature-controlled box is a living and cheerful face. No need to take my word for it. Leonardo da Vinci just entered the room, took the keyboard, and typed his thoughts on the science of painting frenetically:

O, marvellous science, you keep alive the transient beauty of mortals and you have greater permanence than the works of nature.

Behind the fame, mustache, and memes, and even after millions of stares, Mona Lisa still smiles.

And there’s the Moment of Wonder.

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Sources

Marcel Duchamp, in James Johnson Sweeney Conversation with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day, W W·NORTON & Co. New York, 1958.

Marcel Duchamp, The Afternoon Interviews with Calvin Tomkins, 1964.

Marcel Duchamp, "Dada." Interview by Herbert Crehan. WBAJ-FM Radio, New York, 1961. Transcribed by Robert Cowan. Published in Evidence, no. 3 (Fall 1961).

Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo Da Vinci, with a Selection of Documents Relating to His Career as an Artist.

"La Joconde nue", catalogue sous la direction de Mathieu Deldicque.

Trois cartons et un report de carton de Léonard de Vinci et de son entourage : le Portrait d’Isabelle d’Este, La Joconde nue, la Tête d’enfant de trois quarts, La Vierge aux fruits.

Mona Lisa, The Story Behind The Fame.

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The long journey for the Impressionist train to arrive at the Gare d’Orsay railway station

It had been a long train ride. Not only the forty years since the Musée d’Orsay opened, but 150 years since Impressionist paintings were dismissed as daubs painted by monkeys.

Today, visitors from all over the world admire those colored smudges, now considered the most important Impressionist collection ever assembled, a legacy we explored in ‘Origins of the Musée d’Orsay’.

With Wonders of the Musée d’Orsay, we first explore the story of the Gare d’Orsay railway station, and then share practical advice on how to experience Impressionist masterpieces today.

The Gare d’Orsay station, a modern building wearing a classical suit

One way to understand why Impressionism was rejected before ending up in the Gare d’Orsay is to first contemplate the staggering social, technological, and artistic changes of the 1800s.

Let’s consider Monet and Rodin, both born in 1840. Their parents were born during the age of candlelight, when the technology was not that different from that of Roman citizens at the time of Julius Caesar.

Fast was the speed of a horse, and monuments were only as big as stone would allow. To reminisce over loved ones, one had to employ an artist to paint or sketch them. But from the time when Claude and Auguste were babies, it all went into overdrive.

The train left horses in the distance, the Eiffel Tower touched the clouds, and photography could capture faces and landscapes accurately and cheaply. Electricity started to replace gas lights in the streets, and the telegraph allowed fast communication over long distances.

The world had changed beyond recognition and kept evolving with the thundering pace of a locomotive. It was exhilarating, but also terrifying. When Monet painted a railway station, he was embracing change instead of fighting it.

Paris, 1900, and the Exposition Universelle

Only three years before the 1900 Exposition Universelle world fair, two seemingly unrelated events occurred, at nearly the same time and a very short distance away.

The very first Impressionist room in a museum opened. Critics were horrified that daubs were elevated to the realm of museums, the very same that are the heart of today’s Musée d’Orsay.

The second event was, in preparation for the World Fair, architects were preparing design proposals for a new railway station, the Gare d’Orsay.

The Eiffel Tower was a temporary structure built for the 1889 fair. For the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the new railway station would use nearly twice as much metal as the Eiffel Tower, but it would be covered in stone.

Victor Laloux, the architect selected to design the railway station, was the pure product of the very same Academic mindset that deemed Impressionism a war on beauty. He was, of course, absolutely correct in saying that since the station was a stone’s throw from the Louvre, it had to fit.

Yet, compare the TWA Flight Center at JFK airport, sixty years later, completely embracing the jet age, to the Gare d’Orsay, the most modern railway station of the age. Forget about the noises and smells of steam engines; this was the first major electric train station.

It was only ten years since London opened its electric subway, and Paris would open its own for the 1900 fair.

The Gare d’Orsay was a technological leap: while the Eiffel Tower was made of iron, it was instead made of steel, the very material that allowed skyscrapers to be the tallest structures ever built.

The Gare d’Orsay, a Versailles-like luxury hotel

The Gare d’Orsay’s impressive modernity hid under layers of classical-looking stone. It comprised a hotel and restaurant, which cosplayed the grandeur of Versailles, with its gilded ballroom.

The decor was fancy from a distance, as long as one did not look too close, as scratching one’s fingers on the marble revealed it was painted plaster.

That fake grandeur embodied the weird, psychotic dance of the age: one foot in the past, the other into the future. It was like a robot wearing a wig and fancy dress, illustrating the inability to choose between an ideal classical past and a fast-moving present.

Since this is poetic time travel, it would be quite funny to see the horrified reactions of most passengers if their electric train travelled from 1900 to the 21st century, only to see the beautiful station ruined by these blurry smudges.

From fishing inside the Gare d’Orsay station to gradual abandon

In 1910, the Gare d’Orsay was submerged by the Seine flood, and as the photo above shows, some Parisians took advantage of the situation to fish.

By 1935, the station started to overplay its use; the trains were becoming longer and larger, and could not fit inside the Orsay station.

In 1945, it was the main reception center for Nazi camp survivors and war prisoners. For the next 30 years or so, the Gare d’Orsay was gathering dust, part suburban train station, theatre, car park, auction room, and movie set.

The Gare d’Orsay station almost suffered the same fate as Penn Station

Hold on to your train ticket tightly, dear reader. In 1901, Alexander Cassatt visited his sister Mary Cassatt in Paris. As he was in the train business, he visited the most modern train station of the age, and a lightbulb lit over his head.

His problem was coal smoke in the New York tunnels. Inside the Gare d’Orsay, he saw the solution, electric trains, and the result was Penn Station. It is not the only link between the two: in the early 60s, both were earmarked for destruction.

Yes, the decision had been taken, the Gare d’Orsay was set to be destroyed and replaced by a large hotel. The difference is that in 1971, the Minister of Culture stepped in and forbade its destruction.

The Impressionist train, which was waiting on the other side of the river, at the Jeu de Paume museum, could prepare to cross the bridge for its new home, the Musée d’Orsay.

1986, a railway station becomes the Musée d’Orsay

The Impressionist train finally found its home in 1986, when the former railway station was refurbished into a museum dedicated to the 19th century, not just Impressionism.

It is a few minutes’ walk away from the Louvre, which housed Impressionism before the war. The Musée d’Orsay is a continuation of the Louvre, in that it spans up to 1850, from where the Musée d’Orsay takes over.

If museums could talk to each other, the Louvre would shrug at the paltry number of paintings on display at the Musée d’Orsay, over 1,000 at any given time.

But that still is more than enough to overwhelm anyone, but the sort that derails instead of wondering at the passing landscape. So that calls for the practical advice now.

A practical guide to visiting the Musée d’Orsay in the age of mass tourism

This story promised a practical visit guide for the age of mass tourism. The mass tourism part is one of the key words here, as there is a wide gap between expectation and reality.

Maybe you have a poster of Monet’s ‘Poppy field’ in your living room. It means you are really on intimate terms with a masterpiece, and you’ve long dreamt of seeing the real thing, as the poster colors faded with time.

If that is the case, your goal is to see for yourself the largest concentration of Impressionist masterpieces. But how do you go about finding yourself alone in front of the iconic Moulin de la Galette, like the lucky person above?"

Disclaimer: these lines were written by an art historian who happens to know the Musée d’Orsay corridors as if a second home.

As it says on the cover, the goal here is to gain a Moment of Wonder. Not just crossing oceans to tick boxes, but meeting your heroes, making it worth your while when you’ve dreamt for years to see a particular Monet or Renoir.

Be overwhelmed by your museum visit rather than be underwhelmed by masterpieces

Easy to say, but how to do that in real life? Allow me to lay out what you should consider when you’ve long dreamt of visiting the Musée d’Orsay.

Take your time

The Musée d’Orsay might be ‘small’ compared to the neighbouring Louvre, but it is still a museum with five floors, and around 3,000 artworks, paintings, statues, and objects on display.

Particularly if it is your first and probably only visit, to meet expectations, find your way around, and see the artwork you wanted to see, there is no other means than having time.

And when you found the masterpiece you’ve waited years to see, to slow down.

How much time is needed? A minimum of two hours, ideally a good three, so set aside half a day, so you do not have to worry about having to rush elsewhere.

Photo or no photo?

As is obvious here, I myself take photos in museums. And there’s a but coming: paintings are behind protective glass, making it impossible to take a decent photo.

Plus, as you will discover with Poppy field, that painting is small. Likely a lot smaller than you imagined, as it often is impossible to understand a painting’s size, big or small, from a photo.

Think of a beautiful sunset. Yes, the photo you take will be nice, but never as powerful as the real thing. Like that sunset, disappearing while you look at it, trying to be in awe in front of a masterpiece is down to time.

The average time people look at paintings in museums, as proven by several studies, is 30 seconds.

So, make these 30 seconds count, as you would for the sunset. Be in the moment, and give the painting a chance to deliver the Moment of Wonder you’ve long waited for.

Let the painting do the talking

Here is the link to the Musée d’Orsay online collection, every artwork is photographed, and you can easily get a high-quality photo of the painting that tries to overwhelm you.

- Link to the Musée d’Orsay online collection.

Compare the official photo to the real thing, and realize that with Impressionism in particular, the brush movement and color are lost in the photo.

It is like a photograph of a sunset: it can never be as bright or as emotion-inducing as the real thing.

Do yourself a favor, take your time, and look at a masterpiece as you would look at the sunset. Seize the opportunity as if it were the sun about to disappear over the horizon.

Basking in the glow of a masterpiece creates the condition to feel awe, and avoid the risk of being underwhelmed.

Practical considerations for visiting the Musée d’Orsay

Book your ticket in advance.

Nowadays, most museums impose timed entry. While it does ruin the idea of spending one’s holiday following the mood of the day, it is an unavoidable reality. So, book your ticket from the Musée d’Orsay directly, and never from resellers.

Forget about visiting on a Tuesday.

On Tuesdays, nearly all Parisian museums close, and the only major museum still open is the Musée d’Orsay... One may have thought someone would try to do something about this, but the plain reality is that on Tuesdays, the museum is packed from morning to afternoon, so don’t bother.

Plan a coffee or lunch break during your visit.

Do like the happy people depicted in the Moulin de la Galette, sit down, get a coffee or lunch, and relax. Both the restaurant, on the first floor, and the cafeteria, on the fifth floor, are lovely places to stop by.

Overtourism and crowds: Is there a secret to avoiding crowds?

Yes and no. This story was illustrated in February, during the Thursday evening late opening, till 9.30 pm. It was the lowest of the low season, and was photographed mostly in the last half-hour, when most visitors had left.

On a Tuesday or during school holidays, the Musée d’Orsay will be crowded. But if you favor the late opening of Thursday evening, ideally off-season, there is a good chance it will be quieter.

In any case, crowded or quiet, the main condition to give yourself a chance to be in awe in front of a masterpiece is to take your time.

If you do, there’s a good chance the Impressionist train will transport you to Montmartre or Normandy in the 1870s.

There’s the Moment of Wonder.

Art Journey private guided tour of the Musée d’Orsay.

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Before a railway station became the Musée d’Orsay, there was Gustave Caillebotte

The train carrying the biggest Impressionist art collection ever assembled did not pull into the station ‘Musée d’Orsay’ for the 1986 museum opening.

Nor in 1900, when the first passengers alighted at the Gare d’Orsay, the railway station that would one day become a museum.

It left the station in 1876, and the painting above, which just entered the Musée d’Orsay collection, is its key.

Without Gustave Caillebotte, here painting himself with his friend Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette behind him, there would be no Musée d’Orsay as we know it today.

Why? If anyone were trying to purchase, at today’s value, all 40 paintings of the Caillebotte collection that form the heart and soul of the Musée d’Orsay, the cost would run into billions.

Yet, in 1876, Caillebotte, a young painter, friend and benefactor to his fellow Impressionists, wrote a will meant to give his entire collection to French museums for free.

Today, the scene would be straight out of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. A Simplon-Orient-Express carries curators and collectors from all over the world heading to Paris, and only one would be left standing to sign Caillebotte’s generous offer.

Instead, 150 years ago, Caillebotte’s will mentions:

A lapse of time is needed before the execution of this clause, until the public admits, if not understands, this style of painting. That may take twenty or more years.

Why the need to give people twenty years to contemplate the possibility of accepting the biggest Impressionist art collection ever assembled for free?

The impression given by Impressionists is that of a cat that walked on a piano keyboard, or a monkey that grabbed a paintbox

These words were printed on the front page of a major newspaper. We are in 1875, and the previous year, young artists rented their own exhibition space. A journalist turned the title of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, into an insult, Impressionism.

Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, and others did not display their art for art’s sake, but to sell and put food on the table. The exhibition was a financial catastrophe, which is why an auction to cover its losses took place.

The police intervened to calm the mob, trying to prevent the sale of unworthy daubs.

The front page monkey insult was about that auction, so it is not surprising that Renoir got an average of 110 francs per painting, roughly the cost of two gilded frames.

This is why Caillebotte knew it would take time for the public to stop seeing Impressionism as a war on beauty.

Caillebotte was indeed prescient. About 20 years later, he collapsed in his garden, aged only 45 years old. By then, 1894, his collection amounted to 70 Impressionist masterpieces.

Trying to offload the biggest Impressionist art collection ever assembled, for free

Before our train stopped at the negotiations for the bequest of the largest Impressionist art collection, it made a quick stop in 1892. Renoir is now in his early 50s, and French museums still do not display any of his paintings.

But his friends successfully campaigned for a Renoir be finally purchased for French museums. The sum, keep the number in mind, was 4,000 francs.

An auctioneer valued the collection: Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Millet, Pissarro, Sisley, and, of course, Renoir.

He listed 63 paintings, for a total of 40,000 francs. Which is 600 francs per masterpiece, far from the 4,000 francs paid for one Renoir.

In any case, these numbers were meaningless; it was not a purchase, but a bequest. Was there a catch in Caillebotte’s will?

But I require that this gift be accepted in such a way that the paintings do not go into an attic nor a provincial museum, but to the Luxembourg museum and later the Louvre.

Daubs painted by monkeys in the Louvre?

And that was the catch. In truth, most of the people in charge of the culture ministry had smelled café au lait and understood it was time for Impressionism to enter state museums.

The main stumbling block was a lack of space, and the idea that Impressionism would enter the Louvre one day.

The Louvre was only for dead artists. You had to be dead for ten years to enter the Louvre, and Renoir, Monet, and others were still going strong, thank you very much.

There was a museum for living artists, the Musée du Luxembourg, which did not have enough room by then to display Caillebotte’s treasure.

Yes, today you would think that building a museum extension in exchange for the biggest Impressionist collection was an easy choice to make. But in 1894, we are still only twenty years from the ‘monkeys going to war against beauty’.

Art officials knew that the sight of Impressionism in museums might cause an epidemic of heart attacks in the ranks of academic painters.

The sticking point was that Caillebotte did not want his collection to be shelved; he aimed high, the Louvre as the ultimate terminus for the Impressionist train.

There was no available railway station for that train yet, so, in the end, 40 of the 70 paintings were accepted.

Missed opportunities

In the late 1920s, thanks to a large supply of café au lait, officials tried to get the Caillebotte family to give them the rest. By then, the answer was no. In 1931, one of the paintings listed on the donation was offered for the equivalent of five times the estimate of the entire collection.

Officials balked at paying so much for something they could have gotten for free, so Dr. Barnes purchased it and is now in Philadelphia. Almost 40 years after being offered the entire collection, it was too late; French museums had missed the train.

Impressionism squeezed into a small museum room

It took three years of negotiation and building an extension to the Musée du Luxembourg for the Caillebotte donation to be revealed to the public.

Although the building had more in common with a garden conservatory than a museum, the new room was cramped and dark. Camille Pissaro, coming to see his own painting in a museum, describes the scene:

Screaming crowd, I’m told. Besides, dismal room, narrow, badly lit, ugly frame and stupid hanging.

One room, everything piled on top of each other. But even that one room, then the only museum in the world displaying Impressionist works, caused consternation in the press. An art newspaper describes the Caillebotte room as:

An ugly and shameful lair, as repulsive as a museum of pathological specimens.

On the first page of a newspaper, THE CAILLEBOTTE AFFAIR:

The public, surprised by the abundance of studies and daubs in a national museum, laughed, slightly upset, to accept, in the end, the decision.

The badly lit, small room nevertheless became the Signal Light for the new generation of painters, crowding the platform to board the train toward modernity.

Finally, Impressionism enters the Louvre

In theory, artists had to be dead for ten years to enter the Louvre. An art collector, Isaac de Camondo, made such an important donation that an exception to the rule was made.

By the time they were about 80 years old, both Renoir and Monet got a chance to see their art in the Louvre. Sadly, there was no fly on the wall that day to witness their reaction. But Renoir had said this about the Louvre:

It took me twenty years to discover painting. Twenty years to look at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

Needless to say, both artists went to the Louvre as young painters to learn from the greats. Now, they measured the distance from struggling monkeys dabbing with paintbrushes to rubbing frames with the old masters.

By 1929, all the paintings donated by Caillebotte were in the Louvre. But soon after, a failed painter had realized his sole talent was politics, and was about to set the world on fire, and to organize the biggest art theft in history.

He had the same taste as the academic artists who hyperventilated at the sight of anything blurry and colorful.

Escaping Nazis, the museum exodus lorry train

Before the Germans arrived, the Louvre director had organized for the treasures of the Louvre be sent to safety, packed and shipped in a convoy of 200 lorries. They spent the war in castles, but not without danger.

In 1944, when German troops threatened to torch two castles protecting museum masterpieces, only the bravery of curators prevented the unthinkable.

After the war, the lorries returned to the Louvre and carried the Impressionists to a small museum around the corner, the Jeu de Paume.

Impressionism in transit at the Jeu de Paume

During the war, the Jeu de Paume was the central point for the Nazi art loot. The Reich top brass used it as their own private art gallery, expecting no one would witness what they did. They were wrong.

In that museum was a harmless-looking, unpaid assistant curator who decided to save the beauty of the world, risking her life every day, for four years. She stopped the last art train to Berlin and became the number one source for rescuing the stolen art.

The name of the heroine? Rose Valland, the art spy.

For forty years, the Impressionist train was stationed at the Jeu de Paume. There was an abandoned railway station on the other side of the Seine River, about to become the terminus.

Caillebotte’s gift is the root of the wonders of the Musée d’Orsay

Before the train arrives at the Orsay railway station, in the second part of this story, it is worth contemplating the astonishing generosity of those who gave their collections for free.

If one looks at the top masterpieces of the Musée d’Orsay, one realizes that three individuals gifted about two-thirds of the collection.

The root of it all is Gustave Caillebotte. Beyond the fact that 150 years later, the part of his gift that State museums accepted is worth untold billions, there is another facet to his altruism.

It is not just that he helped the very existence of Impressionism by helping financially artists and organizing exhibitions. He was himself a painter, but never tried to push his art into museums; he promoted his friends, not himself.

His brother added two of his paintings to the gift. His art was hidden from view, and, for most people, the name Caillebotte was that of the money man behind Impressionism.

The artist was forgotten. In 1994, 100 years after his death, a major Caillebotte exhibition was held in Paris, Chicago, and Los Angeles, revealing that he was also one of the major Impressionist painters.

Now that his self-portrait just entered the Musée d’Orsay collection, we can ponder on one man’s elegance and self-effacement.

And realize that without him, the Musée d’Orsay would look more like a railway station than the first Impressionist art collection in the world.

There’s the Moment of Wonder.

Part 2 will be Wonders of the Musée d’Orsay:

A practical guide to the Musée d’Orsay: how to navigate the world’s greatest Impressionist collection and escape the crowds.

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Sources

The art collectors who generously gave their collections are Gustave Caillebotte, Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, and Isaac de Camondo.

Gustave Caillebotte’s 1876 will, translated by the author.

Le Figaro, 24 Mars 1875, translated by the author.

Le Journal des Artistes, 18 Septembre 1898, translated by the author.

Le Siècle, 14 Mars 1897, l’affaire Caillebotte, translated by the author.

Renoir, par Jean Renoir, 1962, translated by the author.

Camille Pissarro, Lettres à son fils Lucien, 14 février 1897, translated by the author.

Le Musée du Luxembourg : les peintures de l’école française; par Léonce Bénédite, 1923.

Caillebotte et les Impressionnistes: Histoire d’une collection, by Fanny Matz, Paul Perrin, Sadekova Souria, Stéphane Guégan.

Private visit to the wonders of the Musée d’Orsay.

Moments of Wonder

When Impressionism was seen as 'hideous daubs'

Dear reader, we climb aboard the time machine and land in 1874. Walking the streets of Paris, we soon realize that what we hoped to see, masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, and Degas, are nowhere to be seen…

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a year ago · 4 likes · Moments of Wonder

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Impressionism's Unsung Master, Caillebotte

Dear reader, you may not know Caillebotte's name, and you are forgiven. It is hard to pronounce in English, as it sounds like Key - eye - bot…

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a year ago · 8 likes · Moments of Wonder

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Jacques Jaujard, the quiet hero who organized the largest art rescue operation ever.

Jacques Jaujard, the hero who saved the Louvre from the Nazis…

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Art historians' minds against Nazi guns: how curators faced the Nazis to save the treasures of the Louvre.

The untold stories of the heroes who saved the Venus de Milo and Winged Victory from being burned by the Nazis…

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a year ago · 4 likes · Moments of Wonder

Time travel to Montmartre with Renoir in the 1870s

In the summer of 1876, Renoir set up his easel in the garden of a guingette on top of Montmartre. Every day or so, he returns to paint what will become, by the end of summer, the Bal du Moulin de la Galette.

To give you, dear reader, an accurate impression of that magical moment, as 150 years ago is both close and far away, this story brings you rarely seen photos of Montmartre in the 1870s.

Better still, one of the figures in the painting, the man in the right-hand corner, will be our guide from the past to the present. His name is Georges Rivière, a painter, writer, and defender of Impressionism from its birth.

English-speaking readers have, for 150 years, been deprived of that first-hand witness. This story translates, for the first time, his recollections into English. All the quotes here are his words, a direct link to the Moulin de la Galette garden.

Everything here is deeply grounded in historical facts and research, but wrapped in the poetry and wonder befitting of a summer afternoon in Montmartre as seen by Renoir.

Montmartre in the 1870s had undergone tragedies

Georges looks at us, 150 years into the future. After the shock at realizing that the Montmartre he knew has vanished, that Impressionist paintings decorate chocolate boxes and sell for unimaginable sums, he feels the need to explain what it was really like.

In the photo above, taken around 1850, Montmartre was outside Paris. It was the countryside at Paris’ door, a windmill-covered hill, as well as market gardens, and derelict houses. In 1860, at the stroke of the pen, it became part of the City of Light.

Only five years before he posed for his friend, Montmartre was a City of Darkness, surrounded by German troops blockading and starving Paris.

Then, during a popular uprising, the Commune, the people of Montmartre took their guns against the government for better rights and lives, and were slaughtered by the thousands.

Montmartre was a village within Paris

Georges hopes the people of the 21st century realize that when he and Renoir climbed Montmartre, there was no Moulin Rouge, and no Sacré Coeur. The hill was a place of poverty and revolutionary spirit, with the smell and sounds of the countryside.

He feels that telling you about the dark background behind the painting helps you understand that where you see gentle faces daydreaming under dappled sunlight, most in his day saw a subversive and badly painted daub.

Renoir moves to the top of Montmartre

That summer of 1876, Georges helped Renoir find a place to rent in the ‘village within Paris’. They stumbled upon a decrepit old house that had its own hidden green oasis, and a “furnished rooms to rent” sign at the door.

Renoir was overjoyed. He had never hoped to find anything in Montmartre that even approached this marvel.

The next morning, an old porter hauled up to rue Cortot all the painter’s equipment, including a beautiful white canvas destined for the execution of the large painting.

The Moulin de la Galette Bal

Every day or so, Georges and Renoir pick up the large canvas from the stables where it spent the night to walk five minutes away to the Moulin de la Galette.

Georges knows that modern readers may be confused by this business of mills. He explains that it had been a while since millers realized they could charge Parisians a few cents to climb up their moulins for the commanding view of Paris.

Adventurous millers saw an opportunity to set up a guingette at the foot of their mills. Since the word guingette cannot be translated into English, Georges proposes a simple image: take old, worm-eaten fences, and turn them into tables.

Clear up your old barn, entice musicians and punters with wine so cheap you could disinfect floors with it. Get your spouse to cook some food, et voilà, you’ve got yourself a guingette.

A miller's family, who turned their windmills into a guinguette, sold galettes, pancakes, which is how the place became Moulin de la Galette, the ‘pancake windmill cabaret’. Georges now paints a picture for us:

At the back of that room, a stage was reserved for the orchestra, composed of around ten poor devils, condemned to blowing into their discordant instruments for eight hours every Sunday.

Behind the orchestra stage was a garden, a courtyard, planted with shrivelled acacias, filled with tables and benches. The ground, covered with gravel, was sturdy and flat enough so that one could dance there at the same time as the dancehall, which was then open on all sides.

Who were the sort of people hanging out at the Moulin de la Galette in 1876?

The Moulin was the ordinary meeting point of the laborer families of Montmartre. Parents and the little children sat at tables, ate pancakes, drank wine or beer, while young ladies danced frantically until dinner time.

The female element of the Moulin was not only composed of these honest young ladies. There were young women whose profession did not require virtue, but they were there, as the others, for the pleasure of dancing, without any other intention.

It was also the dance that attracted the majority of the youth to the Moulin de la Galette. Among them are a few laborers. The habitual clientele of the Moulin was predominantly composed of neighborhood employees, many artists from Montmartre, and a few students.

The young men and women who came to the ball were always the same; they all knew each other, more or less, and a certain camaraderie was established between them.

The Moulin’s crowd was an interesting little world. Rigid virtue was uncommon among the ball guests, but vice took no more space than virtue.

Love was generally altruistic, and most of these little working-class ladies, who easily gave away their hearts, would never have agreed to sell it. Morals were neither shy nor dissolute. In that corner of Montmartre, all these families knew each other, as do villagers.

The Moulin de la Galette, a laughing spectacle that Renoir dreamed of painting

Worries and misery stopped at the ball’s door. The ballroom, always filled with a young and joyous crowd, animated with dancing, offered a laughing spectacle that Renoir dreamed of depicting in an important painting.

Renoir did not want professional models in his canvas, but the usual guests of the Moulin. It was an enterprise filled with difficulties. Nevertheless, favorable circumstances were reunited against all odds, and the work was joyously completed.

Our days passed cheerfully, shared between the old dwellings rue Cortot and the Moulin, where Renoir worked during the afternoon on his large Bal canvas.

We transported this canvas, every day, between rue Cortot and the Moulin, as the painting was entirely done there. It did not go without difficulties, as when the wind blew, the large frame threatened to take off, like a kite, above Montmartre.

The hidden story behind the Moulin de la Galette painting

Aside from the tragedies of war and uprising that happened only a few years before the painting, there is a poignant tale behind the apparent careless abandon we wonder at today.

When he lived rue Cortot, Renoir got opportunities to enter the familial homes of his models and witness the miserable state of the newborns.

He always felt the greatest tenderness for children -the abundance of children in his work proves it- and was profoundly moved in the presence of the neglected, not to say abandoned, little ones.

Badly fed, badly cared for, confined to unhealthy dwellings, many of them died in their first months. He could not accept the idea of living near these unfortunate without alleviating their pain.

He knew these one-room spaces where families of four or five lived. The homes where his models lived, beautiful young ladies, neatly and elegantly adorned with insignificant trinkets beloved by the young Parisian laborers.

Seeing it up close, Renoir felt for that misery a strong feeling of pity. It did not mean the inhabitants of these slums were sad and seemed to suffer from their poverty. On the contrary, they were of a joyous nonchalance.

In all these homes, one only heard songs and laughs. Sadness, worry for tomorrow, were only fugitive impressions dissipated by the slightest favorable event.

The refuge for fugitive impressions of joy was the Moulin de la Galette, where one left worries and harsh realities at the door.

Renoir used the Moulin de la Galette to fundraise for a nursery

That summer, Renoir was almost as broke as his models, 35 years old, unmarried. But he dreamt of fundraising for a pouponnat, a nursery.

To get the seed funds, he thought of giving an extraordinary theatrical representation at the Moulin de la Galette.

Summer was about to come to a close, the ‘Ball’ painting was almost completed, and rain, now more frequent, gave some free time to the painter. Once the Moulin party was decided, we all went to work.

The evening was extremely joyful. The Montmartre crowd was not difficult to please and applauded frenetically. Even with this success, the proceeds, unfortunately, only left a very mediocre benefit.

So lasted, in the depths of old Montmartre, a summer that beautiful weather did not abandon. For Renoir, it was a period of joyous labor, during which he painted most of the canvases of the 1877 exhibition.

Thanks to the help of wealthy clients, the pouponnat eventually became reality.

Renoir meant, with the Moulin de la Galette, to give an impression of joy and happiness

Georges Rivière painted with his words how the summer of 1876, compressed into a flickering instant in the iconic Moulin de la Galette, felt like.

In the ball, the sun added the gaiety of its light to the joy of the dancers. The play of the rays of the sun adds, in Renoir’s work, an element of joy.

Renoir tried to give an impression of joy, of happiness even, to his paintings. He had the desire to inspire that feeling in the viewer because he despised the spectacle of ugliness, misery, and suffering.

Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette, a quietly revolutionary painting

Georges wants the people of the 21st century to know that while Renoir and the other Impressionists exhibited their work to try and sell, the best reactions were laughter.

He vividly remembered the time when a banker loudly giggled that he and his friends had been duped into paying 50 cents to see daubs and wanted to be reimbursed.

Yet, that same banker, today, if the Moulin de la Galette were offered for sale, would not hesitate to crush all auction records for that daub. That is where the Moulin de la Galette is a lot more than a charming afternoon of joy.

Georges did not wait 150 years to explain why that is; he already did that during the 1877 exhibition.

No one before him ever thought of depicting daily life in such a large canvas. It is a historical painting. Mr. Renoir and his friends understood that history painting is not the laughable illustration of tales from the past.

They opened a path that others will follow. May those who want to do history painting do the history of their time, instead of shaking the dust of past centuries.

And there you have it. What makes the painting cute today is how harmless-looking it is, with these smiling faces. Yet this is precisely what made it revolutionary: the absence of a sermon on morals, or calls to follow a leader into war.

The viewer is not told what to think, and doesn’t need to know history or scripture. Instead, one is offered the visual soundtrack to a daydream.

Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette is groundbreaking for being the first ever depiction of pure, unfettered happiness.

There’s the Moment of Wonder.

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Sources:

Georges Rivière, Renoir et ses amis, 1921. Translated and edited into English for this story by its author.

Georges Rivière, L'Impressionniste, journal d'art, 6 Avril 1877. Translated and edited into English for this story by its author.

Moments of Wonder

When Impressionism was seen as 'hideous daubs'

Dear reader, we climb aboard the time machine and land in 1874. Walking the streets of Paris, we soon realize that what we hoped to see, masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, and Degas, are nowhere to be seen…

Read more

a year ago · 4 likes · Moments of Wonder

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Masters Shoulder to Shoulder: Monet and Renoir By The River

Two starving artists, Monet and Renoir, share bread and work together…

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Learn to recognize a Monet from a Renoir

A practical guide to distinguish a Monet from a Renoir…

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Like a fly on the wall, witness Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael in Rome within one mile of each other

Have you ever dreamt of being a fly on the wall when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel? If so, dear reader, you are in luck, as this story follows a fly that has time-travel abilities.

Our fly’s name is Moschetta, and she doubles as an art detective. She suggests that while it may be a little-known fact, not long after Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel, all three Renaissance geniuses were there.

For three years, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael lived and worked in or near the Vatican. Moschetta wants to grab the chance to tell you what she saw with both wings.

As she buzzes past the three geniuses, she acts like the art detective she is, interviewing eyewitnesses and scouring historical records to present us with the evidence of what she saw.

The Sistine Chapel revealed to an amazed and speechless world

Our little flying detective witnessed that Michelangelo was roughed up by an impatient Pope, Julius II, and the artist didn’t like being pushed. Here is what happened when the Pope tried to sneak in:

Michelangelo once concealed himself, and dropped some planks when the pope entered the chapel, not thinking about who it was and forcing the pope to leave in anger.

Let it suffice to say that in one way or another, Michelangelo was angry with the pope, and then afraid of him, and had to run away.

The angry Pope then:

Threatened that if Michelangelo did not finish quickly, he would have him thrown down from the scaffolding.

Raphael did sneak inside the Sistine Chapel as Michelangelo painted it

Michelangelo did not want to paint the Sistine Chapel and kept making excuses. But Julius II was not the sort of Pope to take no for an answer, and forced his hand. The sculptor reluctantly did the work, but did not like it when anyone hovered around, even less threatened him, as the Pope did.

The discreet Moschetta silently witnessed that:

Since Bramante held the keys to the chapel, he showed it to his friend Raphael so that he would be able to understand Michelangelo’s techniques.

Years later, after Raphael had died, a bitter Michelangelo complained:

Everything he knew about art he got from me.

Moschetta reminds us that when Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling, the younger Raphael was painting the Pope’s apartments around the corner. In Michelangelo’s mind, Raphael was there to ‘steal’ from him.

Of the relation between Leonardo and Michelangelo, there is only one recorded encounter between the two. It was in Florence, when Leonardo tried to embarrass the younger Michelangelo, who turned the humiliation back by reminding Leonardo of his notorious inability to complete anything he had done...

What would happen when one year after the completion of the Sistine ceiling, the Vatican became an artistic coop with three roosters spreading their feathers?

Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael together under the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling

The magic moment lasted three years, from the fall of 1513. Within a mile or so, we have Leonardo, who got a job offer from the Pope’s brother to stay in the Vatican, to work on mirrors, engineering, and botanical studies.

Raphael works a few meters from the Sistine Chapel, painting the walls of the Pope’s apartments.

Michelangelo carves the marble statues like Moses for his tormentor’s tomb two miles away, but is a regular visitor to the Vatican. He is there to prepare Julius II’s tomb inside the basilica, and in any case, is expected to take part in the religious and diplomatic life of the Vatican.

Moschetta could not sneak in a spy camera and photograph all three awkwardly sitting next to each other. But she estimates that there were easily over twenty ceremonies each year when they were expected, plus the diplomatic and special events.

That is why the buzzing detective estimates, over three years, about 80 or so instances when all three sat under the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

As she does not possess mind-reading abilities, she is unable to share what they thought. Yet, as a detective, she presents us with clues.

What did Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci think of the Sistine Chapel?

Leonardo, in his advice to painters, warned:

The others, in order to appear as great draughtsmen, make their nudes wooden and without grace, so they seem to look like a sack of nuts rather than the surface of a human being, or, indeed, a bundle of radishes rather than muscular nudes.

It was written before the Sistine Chapel, but Moschetta is confident it reveals what Leonardo thinks of Michelangelo’s nudes, nothing but wooden sacks of nuts or bundles of radishes...

Our little flying detective points out that the two geniuses’ styles are opposites. One paints masculine, dynamic, and often nude figures, while the other prefers graceful, androgynous, and gently smiling figures.

As to Raphael, Moschetta noticed that there was a noticeable style change after he saw the Sistine Chapel. Raphael’s figures become more muscular and sculptural, and it is not difficult, she believes, to guess where he got that from.

While both Raphael and Michelangelo were in their thirties, Leonardo was in his early sixties, which was a ripe old age during the Renaissance. That probably brings visions, dear reader, of the iconic old wise man image of Leonardo we are used to.

A prankster named Leonardo da Vinci walks the corridors of the Vatican

Moschetta saw Leonardo in action, and she selected for us testimonies to provide a better picture of the real Leonardo:

He was of a beautiful person, proportioned, graceful and of a beautiful aspect. He wore a rose-colored tunic that reached the knee, whereas long garments were then in fashion.

He had a beautiful head of hair, flowing in ringlets and reaching down to the middle of his breast, well combed and curled.

Here is what Leonardo, in his 60s, was up to in the Vatican:

To a very strange lizard, found by the gardener of the Belvedere, he fastened some wings with a mixture of quicksilver made from scales scraped from other lizards, which quivered as it moved by crawling about.

After he had fashioned eyes, a horn, and a beard for it, he tamed the lizard and kept it in a box, and all the friends to whom he showed it fled in terror.

As the genius he was, he found other ways to prank priests:

Often he had the guts of a steer purged of fat, and they came out so small that they could be held in the palm of one hand.

And he had placed in another room a pair of smith’s bellows to which he attached one end of these guts so that by blowing them up he filled the entire room, which was enormous, so that anyone standing there would have to move to one corner.

Moschetta insists that Leonardo was no old bore, and wonders how many kids would love to have such a creatively amusing grandfather!

The genius with a butterfly-like mind

Our winged detective tells us there is more:

He created an infinite number of these mad inventions and also experimented with mirrors, and he tried out the strangest methods of discovering oils for painting and varnishes for preserving the finished works.

Twenty years earlier, trying out one of his ‘strange methods’, that is, in painting the Last Supper, a monk witnessed that Leonardo either spent days painting without eating, or dropped his work midway:

I have also seen him, as the whim took him, go at midday, when the sun was at its height, and without seeking any shade, go from the Corte Vecchia, where he was working on that stupendous clay horse, to the Grazie, to add a stroke or two to the ‘Last Supper,’ and then return immediately.

Our little fly insists on the fact that during his Vatican stay, Leonardo’s apartment was a few steps away from the Pope’s collection of ancient marble masterpieces. Yet he preferred studying the gardens, creating mirrors, and practicing anatomy rather than marveling at ancient masterpieces, like Michelangelo and Raphael.

Moschetta suggested comparing Leonardo’s mind to that of a butterfly, as she witnessed how enthralled he was observing the flight of birds, to then switch to whatever invention he was cooking up in the studio.

An elephant, a fly, and three geniuses in the Vatican

Moschetta is an art detective and does not mind when her evidence gets questioned. So, if you wonder, dear reader, how we can be sure, even with her having witnessed the many opportunities for all three to be in the Sistine Chapel, that they did actually rub shoulders?

After all, the Sistine is big enough for the three roosters to stay as far as possible from each other. That is absolutely correct. But there is one unusual story where all three were most likely not only in attendance, but in close vicinity.

Pope Leo X received an exotic gift from the King of Portugal, an Indian elephant named Hanno. When the elephant arrived at the Vatican, in a lavish procession, all members of the Papal court were there. Leonardo, in fact, lived almost next door to the Pope’s elephant.

Our little flying detective insists that, yes, that tale of an elephant, a fly, and three geniuses in one place is true.

Leonardo da Vinci rarely finished anything he started

The little detective could list all the works Leonardo never completed, but worries it would take all day. So, she reports what happened when the Pope tried to commission Leonardo for a small painting:

It is said of Leonardo that when the pope commissioned a work from him, he would immediately begin to distil oils and herbs for the varnish; as a result, the pope exclaimed:

‘Alas, this man is never going to do anything, for he starts to think about finishing the work before it is even begun!’

Considering how violent the impatient Julius was toward Michelangelo, one wonders what he would have done to a man who could spend years refining a painting and was now getting rusty.

Three years, three geniuses in the Vatican, how did the highest concentration of talent in one place end?

Moschetta reminds us that:

There was great animosity between Leonardo and Michelangelo, and as a result, Michelangelo left Florence on account of this rivalry.

Leonardo packed his strange inventions, paintings, and notebooks to go to France. Michelangelo left Rome to work in Florence. In 1516, by the time the others left town, Raphael was a lot more than a painter. He was:

• Architect of Saint Peter.

• Prefect of marble and stones, in charge of all the stone works for the Vatican.

• Commissary of Antiquities, meaning the Pope’s curator.

• Writer of briefs, an administrative position, but a great cash machine.

With the stage all to himself, Raphael was equivalent to an arts minister and a close court member.

That astonishing achievement came to an untimely end. Doctors, believing he had a fever, ‘cured’ him by bleeding him to death. He expired on his birthday, at only 37.

Little Moschetta brought you, dear reader, all the facts about that astonishing concentration of talent in one place. She hopes it helped you realize that if artistic power could be turned into electricity, these three could have lit all of Renaissance Italy.

As she flies off, she trusts that the evidence she shared that Leonardo was a creative prankster, Michelangelo a grumpy genius, and that Raphael quickly rose to their level proves that art history is far more fascinating than fiction or memes.

There’s the Moment of Wonder.

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Sources

Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker, Yale University Press, p. 130.

Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

The Anonimo Gaddiano.

Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo.

Le lettere di Michelangelo Buonarroti, CDXXXV.

Matteo Bandello, Novelle.

Il diario di Leone X di Paride de Grassi: dai volumi manoscritti degli Archivi Vaticani della S. Sede.

Image of Saint Peter, circa 1550.

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Champollion, the linguist who outsmarted the code breakers

Standing in front of the Rosetta Stone in real life feels like being in the presence of a civilization-defining artefact. I apologize in advance, dear reader, for revealing the less romantic truth: Champollion never laid eyes on it.

That certainly isn’t saying the Rosetta Stone is not important; it is. The point here is to realize the challenge faced by Champollion in trying to crack the Rosetta Stone, and how he succeeded at reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs where others failed.

To do that, let’s first discuss the difficulty of code cracking.

What ‘cracking a code’ actually means: the Enigma machine

The Nazis devised what they thought was an unbreakable code, the Enigma machine. It allowed, with the 4 rotor model visible in the photo above, 158 quintillion combinations, and for the 5 rotor version, 18 sextillion.

In plain language, the machine above has more variations than there are grains of sand on Earth. The 5 rotor version has about the same as there are stars visible in the universe... Astronomical numbers indeed!

Yet, Enigma, thanks to the genius of Alan Turing and many others in the war effort, was broken. But there was one code during the Second World War that remained unbroken, due to a seemingly simple barrier: language.

Language is the harder code to break

With code breaking, the starting point is to know what language the enemy is using. With Enigma, it was German, so once the fiendishly complex mathematics were resolved, understanding the message was easy.

The Indian Code Talkers’ strategy was that if the enemy did not know the language used in the code, he would not break it. The genius idea was suggested by the son of a missionary who spoke fluent Navajo.

Few people spoke Navajo; there were no Japanese-Navajo dictionaries, therefore it was most unlikely that any Japanese knew the Navajo language.

How the Navajo code was almost as difficult as Egyptian hieroglyphs to understand

The Navajo men who devised the code went further than just talking to each other in their language.

The system they created was based on sounds and ideograms, which literally means ‘writing an idea’.

• sounds: the sound A for the letter A, but in English, translated into Navajo. For example, wol-la-chee, Ant, be-la-sana, Apple, or tse-nill, Axe, words that have nothing to do with A in the Navajo language, were code for A.

• ideograms: here the Navajo Code Talkers invented from scratch a system, where ‘egg’ meant bomb, ‘iron fish’ was a submarine, ‘turtle’ a tank, and so on.

Even if you somehow spoke Navajo, good luck understanding what went on. The Japanese realized they had a Navajo prisoner, so they tortured him to crack the code. Joe Kieyoomia described:

They wrote Navajo words in English and asked what they meant. So, I told them: ‘This means bird, this means turtle, this means water”.

The torture was completely useless, as, aside from the fact that he refused to help, he “didn’t know about the code.”

The code was unbreakable; a mix of sounds and ideas, not unlike the puzzle carved on the Rosetta Stone.

Reading and understanding are vastly different things, case in point: Etruscan

Navajo is a living language, so now imagine the difficulty of cracking ancient inscriptions that have not been understood for millennia. Etruscan is not even that far, as it was at the dawn of the Roman era, in Italy, as the Etruscans lived in today’s Tuscany.

Their inscriptions used a Greek-based letter system, so it is easy to read Etruscan. But fiendishly difficult to understand.

There are still five millennia-old writing systems waiting to be deciphered

History began over 5,000 years ago with the invention of writing in Iraq, Egypt, and Iran. The tablet below was discovered in 1901 in Iran. It is about 5,000 years old, an accountancy document, but we understand nothing beyond that.

To crack it, one would need another Rosetta Stone and a new Champollion.

Jean-François Champollion cracked codes on his birthday, as you do

It had been 1,400 years since the last Egyptian priest who knew how hieroglyphs were written died. The Rosetta Stone contained a known system, Greek, and two different scripts, demotic and hieroglyphic, both in the language spoken by ancient Egyptians.

For 20 years, the most brilliant minds of the age treated the Rosetta Stone as a mechanical cipher (a bit like Enigma) and were therefore wrecking their neurons on the black stone. Then came an unconventional genius, Jean-François Champollion.

It is almost Christmas 1821, Jean-François’s 31st birthday. The man spends his birthday thinking of the Rosetta Stone, or at least the paper copy, as he never saw the actual stone in real life.

For all these years, a very simple mathematical fact was staring at everyone in the face, including the brilliant Thomas Young, but no one saw it.

Champollion asked himself, how many Greek signs, and how many hieroglyphs are on the stone? With a pen and paper, he wrote down:

• 486 Greek letters.

• 1,419 hieroglyphs.

Everyone was stuck on the idea that one hieroglyph = one idea, or one letter. That simple tally meant it was mathematically impossible. Champollion was no Alan Turing; he was a linguist, but what he did on his birthday was equivalent to breaking the mathematics of the code.

As luck had it, he already had within him the second key to the code, language.

Champollion, the man who spoke Coptic all alone to himself

Exactly as Latin is for Catholics, Coptic is the ceremonial language of Christian Egyptians. Before the Rosetta Stone was discovered, it was already known that Coptic was most likely the language spoken by the end of the Egyptian civilization.

At 11 years old, Champollion first got to see hieroglyphic inscriptions and vowed to dedicate his life to breaking them. At 16 years of age, he was fluent in a dozen languages. He met a Coptic priest in Paris, and teenage Champollion declared:

I wish to know Egyptian like my French, because on that language will be based my great work on the Egyptian papyri...

I find in it the greatest joy, as it is quite something to speak the language of my dear Amenophis, Sethosis, Ramesses, Thutmosis.

I dream in Coptic. I do nothing but that, I dream only in Coptic, in Egyptian... I am so Coptic that, for fun, I translate into Coptic everything that comes into my head.

I speak Coptic all alone to myself, since no one else can understand me. This is the real way for me to put my pure Egyptian into my head.

Breaking Enigma took, from Marian Rejewski, Alan Turing, and the thousands of people at Bletchley Park and beyond, 12 years of work. Now that Champollion started to unlock the mathematics of the code, he would decipher hieroglyphs within 11 months.

Champollion, from cracking a code to reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs

To be fair, Champollion was not alone; he steered a tandem bicycle, while his elder brother Jacques-Joseph helped from the second seat. Weeks after his birthday, Champollion used three bilingual documents:

• The Rosetta Stone, with its PTOLMYS (Ptolemy) cartouche.

• The Bankes’ obelisk, with a hieroglyph and a Greek inscription to read CLEOPATRA.

• The Casati Papyrus, in demotic and Greek, to confirm the reading of CLEOPATRA.

By spring, Champollion was able to read Greek names, under the assumption that hieroglyphs had to be used as letters, like our own letters, for Greek Pharaohs.

The Dendera Zodiac arrives in Paris

Champollion came to see it, and, once again thinking out of the box, noticed that all the little figurines, which had to be stars’ names, had 𓇼 hieroglyphs.

A lightbulb lit over the brilliant mind: Egyptians use ‘silent’ hieroglyphs, signs that are not meant to be read at all. When you write a man’s name, you add a ‘little man’ sign, and when you write a star’s name, a ‘little star’, and so on.

The rotors inside Champollion’s brain were unlocking, one after the other. But by summer’s end, the last one was still stuck at the Greek Egyptian stage. It is all well and good to be able to read Cleopatra’s name, but there were 3,000 years of civilization before her that were still in darkness.

Studying Abu Simbel’s inscriptions from Paris

Champollion had never seen the Rosetta Stone, let alone visited Egypt. But a friend of his did, an architect named Jean-Nicolas Huyot. While Napoléon’s scientists had, 20 years earlier, copied at length inscriptions, their depictions were unreliable.

Hence, Champollion badly needed new material. This is exactly what his friend’s detailed sketches of the temples of Abu Simbel and Amada provided. Fifteen years of Coptic study were about to come to fruition.

The date was the 14th of September 1822, and, seated at his Parisian desk, Champollion inspected from afar the carvings of Nubian temples.

Champollion broke the code by reading it in the language of the Egyptians: Coptic

Drum roll. For 23 years, the Rosetta Stone had shortwired the combined brainpower of several geniuses. Champollion could read Greek names, but the genius moment was wondering what would happen if reading Egyptian Pharaoh’s names in Coptic.

𓇳 𓄟 𓋴 𓋴

First example, from Abu Simbel and other Nubian temples. From the Rosetta Stone, he was able to guess that 𓋴 was an S.

The circle 𓇳 was painted red; it was the sun. In the Coptic language, the sun is ‘re’.

The middle letter 𓄟 looked like an M. From the Rosetta Stone, where it talks about ‘birthday’, Champollion could guess that the sign was used for ‘birth’, and Coptic for birth is ‘mise’, a word that begins with an M.

Champollion then read out loud the result 𓇳 𓄟 𓋴 𓋴 Re - M - S - S, Ramesses! The very first Egyptian word read out loud after a 1,400-year silence was that of Ramses II.

𓅝𓄟 𓋴

One imagines that for the second name, Champollion was trembling, sensing that he was about to shine light into a 1,400-year-old mystery.

He already knew that the ibis bird was linked to the god Thot. All he had to do was read the word aloud: Thot - M - S, Thotmes, Thutmosis, another famous Egyptian Pharaoh.

Mike drop.

Jean-François excitedly ran to his brother’s office, screamed ‘I’ve got it’, and fainted from emotion and exhaustion. Two years later, in his Egyptian grammar, he explained that:

Hieroglyphic writing is a complex system, a script simultaneously figurative, symbolic and phonetic, in one and the same text, in one and the same sentence, and, I should say, almost in one and the same word.

Champollion, the genius who resurrected an entire civilization

Champollion, explaining that one hieroglyph can be a sound, or a symbol, or an idea, illustrates that breaking the Egyptian code was like battling with a three rotor Enigma machine.

Another way to express the achievement is with a confession, dear reader. I spent years studying ancient Egyptian, and it fried my brain. Once, I asked my professor:

I do not understand how Champollion did it. I have a grammar and a dictionary, both as thick as a phone book.

Yet a single sentence sometimes takes me hours to translate. One problem can get me stuck for days. How did he do it?

My professor’s response was:

He spoke the language.

Thanks to his language skills and unconventional genius, Champollion did way more than crack the Rosetta Stone. He wrote the ancient Egyptian grammar and dictionary.

In one stroke, he added three millennia to mankind’s history, as until then, the past only went as far as the Greek and Roman world.

It was also a marvelous gift to ancient Egyptians, as, from their point of view, when someone reads aloud their names, it grants them eternal life.

Champollion revived an ancient civilization and hundreds of thousands of people at once, a unique Moment of Wonder.

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Sources

Navajo Code Talkers, World War II Fact Sheet.

Joe Kieyoomia: Neither Navajo captive nor code was broken.

Navajo Code Talkers’ Dictionary.

Richard Parkinson, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment. University of California Press.

How Champollion Deciphered Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

Le voyage de Jean-Nicolas Huyot en Égypte (1818-1819) et les manuscrits de Nestor Lhote. In: Bulletin de la Société française d'égyptologie, n°32, 1961.

Léon de la Brière, Champollion inconnu, lettres inédites.

Papyrus Casati.

Grammaire égyptienne, ou Principes généraux de l'écriture sacrée égyptienne appliquée à la représentation de la langue parlée, par Champollion le jeune.

Dictionnaire égyptien en écriture hiéroglyphique / par J.-F. Champollion le jeune ; publ. d'après les manuscrits autographes,... par M. Champollion Figeac.

Hermine Hartleben, Jean-François Champollion, Sa vie et son œuvre.

Robert Solé, Champollion.

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What were the wages received by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael?

Our virtual time machine already brought us face-to-face with Leonardo da Vinci. This time, dear reader, we gain tax collector privileges, allowing us to comb bank accounts to answer a simple question: how much genius was worth during the Renaissance?

We land in Florence for New Year’s Eve in 1504. This is the crossroad between the age of the craftsman and the era of the genius. The smell of burnt art that filled Florence had finally been cleared.

We are only a few years after Savonarola organized two Bonfires of Vanities, gleefully torching statues, paintings, books, and luxury goods.

That so many Florentine masterpieces ended in ashes is a reminder that the reality of the Renaissance was quite different from the Hollywood version. Instruments of joy and wonder were destroyed, and Leonardo had to beg to get paid, as we shall see.

Landing at that particular New Year’s Eve allows us to stumble upon a magic moment when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael lived within half a mile of each other.

Had a drunk reveller thrown a bottle of Chianti out of the window that night, the Renaissance would not quite look the same.

When one could bump into Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael

Leonardo is 52, and under pressure, as he has been put into a competition with Michelangelo, aged 29. As we previously discovered with “The Artistic Fight of the Century”, the two geniuses are in the middle of an artistic punch out.

The City of Florence commissioned them both to paint the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio, and that competition will leave both men flat on their backs.

A fresh-faced Raphael, aged 21, arrived in Florence to bask in the artistic sparks emitted by the older two.

But the age gap between Leonardo and the other two geniuses was more than a generation; it was a change of era. The end of the contractor age, cap in hand to get paid, and the start of the modern time, when artists were finally decently compensated for their genius.

When Leonardo da Vinci had to insist that he was “no penny painter”

That very New Year’s Eve, Leonardo received a payment of 150 lire for a month’s worth of work to paint a battle on the Palazzo Vecchio’s walls.

When he went to the bank for his salary, which he used to receive every month from Piero Soderini, the cashier wanted to give him certain rolls of pennies, and, being unwilling to take them, he remarked: ‘I am no penny painter!’

That anecdote is an exaggeration, as 150 lire (about 20 ducats) would amount to 36,000 pennies and need a wheelbarrow to collect from the bank... But the feeling of the story is true; this was Leonardo’s life at that point: a tradesman begging his powerful employers to pay him what he was owed.

Leonardo da Vinci, the unpaid craftsman

Here is Leonardo begging the Duke of Milan, his employer:

My Lord, knowing the mind of your Excellency to be occupied. [I am writing] to remind Your Lordship of my small matters...

I should have maintained silence, lest my silence should be the cause of making your Lordship angry... my life at your service, I hold myself ever ready to obey.

The ‘small matter’ was wages, or lack of:

Reminding your Lordship how I have still to receive two years’ salary... I have been working to gain my living.

Here is written evidence of one of the greatest geniuses ever to grace this planet, reduced to inconvenience his master by kowtowing for two years of unpaid wages...

Let us summarize Leonardo’s financial situation. Ducats are used throughout this story for ease of understanding.

The Last Supper in Milan: late payment, given land instead of cash

How much was Leonardo actually paid, cash in hand, for the Last Supper? Leonardo boasted that he got a 2,000 ducats a year salary from the Duke of Milan. That was wishful thinking, as the Duke was busy fighting against the invading French, which is why Leonardo spent two years without pay.

In the end, the Duke gave in lieu of payment a small vineyard of around one hectare. As soon as Leonardo got it, the French seized it, and it would be returned to him half a dozen years later.

Leonardo was also told to his face that he was a lazy employee by the monk in charge when painting the Last Supper:

It seemed strange to him to see how Leonardo sometimes passed half a day at a time lost in thought, and he would have preferred Leonardo, just like the labourers hoeing in the garden, never to have laid down his brush.

He did not even get a wheelbarrow of pennies, but a vineyard as payment for the Last Supper! When Leonardo returned to Florence, he deposited 600 ducats in the bank, a large sum of money, but that represented nearly twenty years of work in Milan.

The Virgin of the Rocks, “the blind cannot judge colors”

In Milan, Leonardo and two other painters get a commission for a church. The contract precisely describes what the image is meant to look like, and offers a total of 800 lire (about 180 ducats) to share between the three painters.

As that amount barely covers their expenses, they complain and argue for better fees. Leonardo was told his painting was worth 25 ducats, but he argued it was worth 100:

(The monks) are not experts in such matters, and the blind cannot judge colors.

Leonardo was treated like a shoddy plumber, and a quarter of a century of arguments ensued over 30 ducats.

Let me repeat it: Leonardo was pestered about the equivalent of a few months of income when delivering one of the Renaissance’s greatest paintings.

Leonardo da Vinci was asked to reimburse his salary

As explained with “The Artistic Fight of the Century”, Leonardo failed to complete the wall of Florence’s City Hall. He was asked to reimburse all the money given and was deemed a ‘traitor’ by Florence’s ruler, since the French pressured him to forgive the debt.

The difficulties encountered by Leonardo to get paid illustrate that he was born in an age when the artist was just a craftsman. The value of an artwork was in the quantity of manual labor, not in the artistic and intellectual quality of the work.

Up to that point, painters belonged to the apothecary guild because they used similar ingredients to chemists. Reading contracts for paintings looked more like a tender for the cheapest quote from builders than a call for geniuses to dazzle the world.

Fortunately for Leonardo, the world slowly caught up with the fact that he was a unique creature, as if Einstein’s brain had been implanted in Raphael’s body.

Leonardo’s golden retirement at the Court of France

Leonardo’s financial situation finally improved when he reached his 60s. He was in the employ of the Pope’s brother for 400 ducats a year. But it is only when Francis I, the young French King, invited him to the Loire Valley that he finally got paid well.

The French King offered 1,000 ducats a year, ten times the usual fee in France for a good painter. Leonardo also got the use of a small castle and a prestigious title, ‘First painter, engineer and architect to the King’.

Francis treated the old genius with great respect, publicly calling him “my father”, and allowed his burial in the royal chapel.

Years after Leonardo’s death, the King reminisced:

He did not believe that a man had ever been born who knew as much as Leonardo, not only in the spheres of painting, sculpture and architecture, but that he was also a very great philosopher.

Michelangelo, or the transition from artisan to genius

In the seismic artistic contest, when two geniuses painted in the same room, at the same time, the elder craftsman still got a financial edge on the newcomer. Leonardo got a total of 187 ducats, and Michelangelo got 100 ducats.

It was to be the last time that Leonardo got the financial better of Michelangelo. It took Leonardo's retirement age to reach the 1,000 ducats a year stage; Michelangelo reached it aged 30, with almost 60 years of career ahead of him.

That is where Leonardo was the last upscale craftsman and Michelangelo the first well-paid genius.

Michelangelo, the wealthy poor artist

To his biographer, Michelangelo said

Rich man as I have made myself, I have always lived as a poor one.

At his death, the contents of his house confirm he lived with very little: no luxury, no books, no fine wine, one horse, and two fur coats.

But in one chest by his bed, he had 8,289 gold ducats (equivalent to 30 kg / 65 lb of solid gold). His bank account had nearly 9,000 ducats, and his properties were worth over 12,000 ducats.

What does it mean? The Palazzo Pitti, one of Florence’s biggest palaces, was bought for 9,000 ducats. Michelangelo could have purchased not one, but three palaces.

Not too bad for the man whose father had beaten him up as a child for choosing the career of a “stonemason.”

Raphael, the princely artist

The youngest of the three, Raphael, sadly died aged only 37 years old. To some art historians, Raphael is the sweet spot for being the middle way between two opposites, Leonardo and Michelangelo.

If this time machine were more than poetic license, the first thing I would do is to search for the instances when these three were in the same room. Not one source says this happened, so this is only a daydream.

But, considering that they lived within half a mile of each other for one and a half years, it is hard to think it did not happen. Even if it was nothing more than at the fishmonger, what would I give to watch these three interact!

Anyway, what about the worth of Raphael’s genius? At his death, he left 16,000 ducats, roughly 8,500 of which were from his work as a painter and architect, the rest from smart investments in real estate and Papal offices.

Raphael lived in a palazzo designed by Bramante. Leonardo spent most of his life as a contractor; Michelangelo could afford to live like a prince, but chose to live the simple life. Raphael did live the life of a prince and is buried in the Pantheon.

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, geniuses’ worth? Beyond billions

Leonardo worked on the Last Supper for two years without wages while the Duke of Milan spent nearly 2 million ducats on war.

When all three geniuses were in Florence, it was the middle of the war with Pisa, costing Florence almost 2 million ducats. That was when Florence’s ruler asked Leonardo to reimburse 180 ducats, a drop in the bucket for the war budget.

Few artworks are widely accepted as universal masterpieces. A shortlist will include the Giza Pyramids, Leonardo’s Last Supper, Raphael’s Papal apartments, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Put together, the investment for these three artworks was roughly 15,000 ducats, or 0,75% spent on one war, at a time when Italian city-states constantly fought against each other.

The misery caused by the Italian Renaissance wars was for nothing; the formerly warring city-states are all part of Italy now.

What was the best long-term return on investment then, 15,000 ducats on art, or millions on war? Just these three masterpieces, the Last Supper, the Stanze, and the Sistine Chapel, are worth, as artworks, billions. On paper, of course, as they will never be sold.

Yet they provide a constant shower of gold ducats, as part of the €25 billion a year Italy gets out of cultural tourism. Spending a single month’s worth of war budget on masterpieces turned out to be the best investment ever. Beyond money, these three geniuses remain influential to artists today.

To answer the question, how much is the genius of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael worth? It is incalculable, and that’s the Moment of Wonder!

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Sources

Rab Hatfield, The Wealth of Michelangelo; Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2002.

John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602).

Carmen Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, 4 vol.

Richter, Jean Paul. The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), Volume II No. 1344 / 1345.

Ascanio Condivi: The Life of Michelangelo.

Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

Bertrand Jestaz, François Ier, Salaì et les tableaux de Léonard.

Benvenuto Cellini translated by the author from the French, ‘Oeuvres complètes de Benvenuto Cellini’.

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Monuments that defy description, be it words or images

For this New Year’s resolutions, we tackle the difference between expectations and reality. Of the good sort, when sites are too extraordinary to be described, ending in wonder and lifetime memories.

We travel together to two ancient civilizations: Rome and Egypt. This story doubles as practical advice on how to experience wonder in an age of mass tourism.

First confession, dear reader: I studied art history at the Louvre School, and I had to learn the majority of the most important monuments around the world. It meant that, on paper, I knew about sites before I got to see them. Supposedly, I was prepared for what I was about to see, yet several sites vastly exceeded my imagination.

An obvious example is the pyramids of Giza. When you finally arrive one mile away, looking at all three, it is still difficult to comprehend how colossal they are.

Once you stand right in front of the Great Pyramid, you start to realize its size, and that it is pointless to try to take a photo, as if trying to photograph a mountain while standing on it.

Since that experience cannot be shared in words or images, it genuinely is beyond words and comprehension.

The impossibility of understanding the scale of the Pantheon of Rome

I got to visit Rome after I graduated, and my head was filled with the photos, paintings, and books I was made to study. One particular monument, the Pantheon, always looked to me as if it could not possibly be real.

There was a fashion for imaginary ruins, so I confess I long assumed the Pantheon was nothing but a flight of fancy.

No photo can prepare you, as it is not possible to squeeze the Pantheon’s interior in one frame, unless one uses a fisheye lens, with the strange and distorted result. Like the pyramids, it is too big to fit in a photo frame.

So, when I walked inside the Pantheon, I was so overwhelmed that my jaw tried to detach itself. Allow me now to give you some sense of why.

The Pantheon, a 1,900-year-old concrete dome

Legend has it that Michelangelo, the architect of the Vatican’s dome, said of the Pantheon that its design was “angelic and not human”. He knew what he talked about, as he was the architect of the Vatican’s dome, built 1,400 years later, yet it is slightly smaller...

The Pantheon is the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built, about one and a half times the size of the Capitol in DC.

The dome is pierced by a 30-foot-wide opening to the sky. You walk on a convex marble floor, conceived to clear rainfalls. The sun is constantly rotating inside, making it an immense sundial. Once a year, on the anniversary of the foundation of Rome, the sun precisely lights the entrance.

It took about 12 years, in the 1850s, to build the Capitol’s dome, using cast iron. That is the same time it took to create a far bigger dome, 1,900 years ago, which still stands nearly intact.

The vertigo one feels is not only due to the colossal dimensions of the Pantheon, but also in having to accept, once and for all, that there were brilliant engineers in ancient Rome and Egypt. It is precisely as JFK asked NASA to go to the moon.

When a Pharaoh or Emperor gives a group of extraordinarily talented people unlimited resources, the impossible becomes reality: pyramids, or the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built.

The Pantheon’s Egyptian link

Rome had taken over Egypt over a century previously, and carried many obelisks to Rome. The grey columns of the entrance of the Pantheon were quarried in Egypt, by the Red Sea, transported over 100 miles of desert mountains, then down the Nile and across the Mediterranean. They weigh 60 tons each.

The red columns inside the Pantheon were carved in Aswan and sailed past Karnak on their way to Rome. The tallest obelisk ever carved was in Karnak, which weighed 450 tons, and it is today in Rome. Transporting colossal stones across countries was no trouble to the Roman engineers.

On to the Nile now.

The impossibility of understanding the scale of Karnak, Egypt’s largest temple

Our time machine lands in the 1870s, when Amelia B. Edwards spent months traveling in Egypt. Photography exists, and Champollion has deciphered hieroglyphs. In A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, she tries to describe Karnak.

It is a place that has been much written about and often painted; but of which no writing and no art can convey more than a dwarfed and pallid impression.

To describe it, in the sense of building up a recognisable image by means of words, is impossible.

The scale is too vast; the effect too tremendous; the sense of one’s own dumbness, and littleness, and incapacity, too complete and crushing.

It is a place that strikes you into silence; that empties you, as it were, not only of words but of ideas.

Days in Karnak left her speechless. But once back home:

The Great Hall of Karnak is photographed in some dark corner of my brain for as long as I have memory.

She explained, better than I can, Moments of Wonder: walking around a monument that leaves an inalterable imprint in one’s memory.

Karnak, the largest temple of Antiquity

The pyramids of Giza are ‘only’ the tombs of Pharaohs. Karnak was, for 2,000 years, Egypt’s religious beating heart, the precise spot where the sun was born.

The priests of that immense temple oiled the divine clockwork mechanism that ensured the yearly flood and the perpetual rotation of the sun and the stars. To the Egyptians, Karnak was the center of the universe for two millennia.

Karnak is the largest temple of the ancient world, spanning 250 acres. The colonnade room is the same size as Notre-Dame. Even repeating the unbelievable does not help: it would take six people holding hands to encircle one of the tallest columns, and 100 people can stand atop.

As with the Pantheon, studying ancient Egypt before first visiting in person did not prepare me for what I was about to see. I kept returning for 25 years, which is how I took photos of all the major sites of Egypt without crowds.

This now begs the practical advice: how to feel wonder at ancient sites in an age of mass tourism?

Experiencing awe in an age of mass tourism

Tourism is indeed a two-sided coin. One benefit is for those lucky enough to afford international travel and discover the wonders of the world for themselves. The other is for local populations who make a living from tourism: every day one is on holiday, one helps put food on the table of many families.

But the drawback is overtourism, too many people, at the same time, in one place. The Pantheon recently imposed a reservation system to deal with the 9 million visitors yearly. Having to book every site one hopes to see adds to the modern pressure: time, or lack thereof.

To be in awe, one needs time to take the time

This is the first issue with trying to experience awe in the modern age, time. The romantic view of Nile cruises is based on books such as A Thousand Miles Up the Nile and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile.

Agatha Christie sailed on a steamship that traveled for three weeks, then spent six months overlooking the Nile to write her book. Most Nile cruises are four to five days long, and dedicate one day to visiting Luxor.

Would you trust someone who promises you that you can experience awe in one day in Rome? Luxor’s archaeological sites are nearly seven times bigger than Rome’s. Seven times!

If it is not possible to enjoy Rome in one day, how can it be possible to enjoy a far larger site in a day?

Yet, from the cheapest to the most luxurious, all Nile cruises have the same schedule and allow barely a day to visit Luxor. This is what you see when you only have one day to visit the largest temple of the ancient world:

The precondition to absorb and contemplate colossal monuments is not to be rushed. Lost in the crowds, with one hour to spare, means it is not possible to experience awe.

As I try to prove with my photos, it is doable to visit Karnak without the crowd. Furthermore, it is also feasible to see what Karnak would have looked like when nearly intact, as it has a smaller ‘twin’, Abydos.

Karnak’s Great Hall was built by Pharaoh Seti and his son Ramses II, and both Pharaohs built the magnificent temple illustrated above. Room after room of nearly intact colonnades, with breathtaking colored reliefs.

And Abydos is not on cruise schedules. This is one example among many that illustrate it is not possible to experience what took ancient travelers one month in four days. That is when there must be more confession time, dear reader.

Missing out on lifetime memories

I wrote this story during the Christmas holiday at my parents’ home. We watched together a documentary about ancient Egypt, when the tomb of Seti, illustrated above, appeared on screen.

My parents went to Egypt many years ago. They have traveled around the world, from the Forbidden City to Tahiti. Egypt remains one of their most beloved travel memories.

Yet, when one of the great wonders of Egypt was on screen, and I asked them what they felt visiting it, I got silence. They had not seen it. An awkward moment ensued. They realized they did go to Luxor, did visit the Valley of the Kings, but were not shown the largest and most beautiful royal tomb of them all.

For me, who had offered them several times to get them back to Egypt, now that their health made a return impossible, it was an unforgivable missed opportunity.

A practical guide to experience awe in the age of mass tourism: ask art historians

To experience awe, which is one of the reasons why one travels abroad, whom should you trust?

Those whose skill is marketing, trying to convince you that it is feasible to experience Paris, Rome, or Egypt in a few days? Or those who spent years studying and visiting cathedrals, temples, and pyramids?

As with my own parents, the goal is that they do not miss out on lifetime memories. The secret recipe is to treat others as family. This is what I, my associates, and contacts in the travel industry do: focus on delivering awe-inducing experiences.

That’s the Moment of Wonder for 2026: daydreaming about experiencing monuments beyond description. Happy New Year!

• To discover Rome, ask my friend Federica, a Roman art historian.

• To set up your holiday in Paris, ask me to set up your travel plans.

• Discover how my associates and I can deliver a once-in-a-lifetime journey to Egypt.

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The Sainte-Chapelle is a monumental jewelry casket

The Sainte-Chapelle is not a chapel, nor a church, nor a cathedral at all. It is a monumental reliquary.

A relic is a physical object, such as the bones of a saint. It is housed in a box. That box contains a heavenly object, shaped like a little house, and is made of precious materials, often gold or gilt silver, set with gemstones.

That jewelled small house symbolizes Heavenly Jerusalem. Here is the Bible description of the “holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven”:

And the building of the wall thereof was of jasper stone: but the city itself pure gold, like to clear glass.

And the foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with all manner of precious stones.

And the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.

And the city hath no need of the sun, nor of the moon, to shine in it. For the glory of God hath enlightened it.

Does it start to make sense? The Sainte-Chapelle is a reliquary, not a building. It is a gemstone-encrusted jewel casket, enlarged to the scale of a building. The stained-glass windows are the gemstone walls of Heavenly Jerusalem.

The Sainte-Chapelle is the largest piece of jewelry ever chased. Its creators worked with iron, stained glass, and stone rather than gold and gemstones. It is a preview of Heavenly Jerusalem inside Paris’ royal palace.

It is a unique shrine, as the only monument on earth conceived as a reliquary jewelry box.

One of Paradise’s most beautiful rooms

A visitor describes:

This chapel possesses such a degree of beauty that anyone entering it feels as if raptured to heaven and imagines, with reason, being introduced into one of Paradise’s most beautiful rooms.

“This crown of the King of Kings is more precious than all the gold in the world”

It should now become clear that the Sainte-Chapelle is not just a reliquary, but the most important of them all, conceived to hold Christianity’s most valuable relic: the Crown of Thorns.

When the relic of the Crown arrived in Paris in 1239, it was described as:

This crown of the King of Kings is more precious than all the gold in the world.

How much was it purchased for? The costs involved:

- purchasing the Crown of Thorns: 135,000 pounds.

- the solid silver reliquary inside the chapel: 100,000 pounds.

- the building, stained glass, iron, and stone: 40,000 pounds.

It may not look like an astronomical amount, but it was. It was more than the annual budget of the kingdom. Religiously speaking, it was more precious than all the gold in the world.

With one year of the budget earmarked for a single goal, it only took about 6 years to build it.

A monument made of light, iron, and stone

There is this idea that the Middle Ages were a Dark Age. One would think that marvelous cathedrals put this idea to rest. Did you know that the Sainte-Chapelle, like her bigger sister around the corner, Notre-Dame, is Paris’ first iron building?

Yes, iron. The restoration of Notre-Dame proved that iron clamps were added from the beginning of the cathedral’s construction, in the 1160s. Not as later reinforcements, but as part of the initial design.

The idea is pushing the physical limits of stone to create a skyscraper almost entirely made of windows.

At the Sainte-Chapelle, one would be forgiven for thinking this is a building from the 1800s, built with cast-iron beams meant to appear ancient. But of course, it was built in the 1240s, with iron bars and clamps throughout, from floor to ceiling.

The photo above shows the iron bars easily visible at the ground level. They were not added during later restoration campaigns, but are original, from the 1240s.

The use of iron reinforcement (chains if you prefer) means that the proportions of the Sainte-Chapelle, width and height, are comparable to several French cathedrals.

Sadly, we do not know the name of the genius who conceived the Sainte-Chapelle. One of the candidates is Pierre de Montreuil, who worked on Notre-Dame’s rose window at the same time.

While we do not have the genius’s name, maybe we should avoid calling him an ignorant barbarian? This is what the label Gothic means.

The Sainte-Chapelle is not Gothic, but the Architecture of Light

Gothic is an insult; it means ‘built by Goths,’ the barbarians blamed for the destruction of Rome and the Dark Ages. Why do we keep repeating the slander? To begin with, the Goths had long vanished by the age of the great cathedrals.

And the Saint-Chapelle is the opposite of an age of Darkness: it is a gigantic lightbox, with 80% windows. May I suggest that we call it “Architecture of Light” instead?

Another myth that needs busting is the social media meme of the Sainte-Chapelle with the caption “these people did not build this for profit”. Really? Let’s burst that bubble with the needle of unvarnished truth.

The Sainte-Chapelle is a political statement

The simple version is that the French King, Louis IX, got his hands on the Crown of Christ. Everything in the Sainte-Chapelle, windows and statues, as well as more relics, such as Moses’ staff, Emperor Constantine’s cross, elevates the King above all other Christian Kings. He became the successor of the Biblical Kings.

Building a private chapel inside his Parisian palace made him the successor of Moses, King David, Christ, and Emperor Constantine. Egyptian Pharaohs were considered sons of the gods, which gave them absolute power. Owning the Crown of Christ made Louis’ power above that of other Christian Kings.

And it earned him Sainthood, how less than thirty years after his death, Louis IX became Saint-Louis.

The Sainte-Chapelle was built during a time of religious intolerance

That is when you need to hold on tight, dear reader. A small list of the reality of Saint-Louis’ reign:

- Before Saint-Louis sat on the throne, a Crusade had been conducted in France. In a single city, 20,000 civilians were massacred for having different beliefs than those of the Pope and King.

- Saint-Louis had 500 people burnt alive.

- Saint-Louis seized and burnt 24 cartloads of Talmuds, Jewish religious books. It was peak antisemitism, Jews were ordered to wear yellow coin signs front and back. Hundreds of French Jews who refused to convert were massacred.

- Saint-Louis went twice on Crusades.

- The Crown of Thorns was acquired when the Crusaders attacked, ransacked, and massacred their way into Constantinople, the wealthier Christian city of the time. The Crusaders slaughtered priests and raped nuns, among many acts of sacrilege, to the point that even the Pope, who had sent them on a Crusade, criticized them.

- There certainly was a profit gained with the fortune spent on the Sainte-Chapelle: Louis IX was made a Saint not long after he died. All Kings of France, owners of the Crown of Thorns, could pretend to be successors of Saint-Louis, representatives of Christ, and King David on earth, as well as Moses’ heirs.

So the Sainte-Chapelle certainly was not built as a beautiful monument for the people of France to enjoy. It was a private chapel within the royal palace, built for the political and religious benefit of one person, the King.

Now that we have summarized the bad, let’s return to the good.

The Sainte-Chapelle, one of the world’s great wonders

Notre-Dame is a fantastic monument, but it is not unique among many cathedrals. There are larger stained-glass windows. But there is only one monument conceived as a colossal gold-and-gem-set reliquary: the Sainte-Chapelle.

There is no exaggeration in saying it is a jewel, as it is meant to be the largest piece of jewelry ever created.

We’ve seen that the background story of the Sainte-Chapelle is far from being pretty. As with ancient pyramids and temples, we do not need to share the beliefs of the people who built them to admire their monuments.

If that story did not suffice to explain why the Sainte-Chapelle is amazing, allow me to reveal what I have personally witnessed. To reach the first level shown in the photo above, one needs to climb a narrow staircase.

People arrive on the first level slightly out of breath. What little air is left in their lungs comes out as :

WOW!

With slight language variations, every other person, when first laying eyes on the Sainte-Chapelle, can only mutter a one-word expression of wonder.

Few monuments can genuinely take one’s breath away. Only one of them is a piece of jewelry large enough for us to be inside, marveling at the sunlight becoming a tapestry of color.

It is the Sainte-Chapelle, a colossal Moment of Wonder.

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Moments of Wonder

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Sources

La Sainte-Chapelle, Jean-Michel Leniaud, Françoise Perrot.

Jean de Jandun. Tractatus de laudibus Parisius (1323), translated and edited for clarity by the author.

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle. Tome 2.

L’utilisation du fer dans l’architecture gothique : les cas de Troyes et de Rouen, Maxime L’Heritier. Université Panthéon-Sorbonne-Paris I, 2007.

Book a private guided tour of the Sainte-Chapelle.

Michelangelo was recognized as a genius before he began

It may be difficult for us to imagine, but geniuses such as Caravaggio, Vermeer, and others were quickly forgotten after their deaths. One significant exception to that rule is with the three greats of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

There are more implausible stories that prove true. For example, a Leonardo painting sawn off and used as a stool...

Leonardo, aged 30, was seeking employment. He listed, in his CV, all the valuable skills he could offer his boss. In a ten-point list, the offer to design buildings, paint, and make statues comes last, almost as an afterthought.

Raphael, aged 21, got a recommendation letter saying he was ‘ greatly gifted in his profession’ and arrived in Florence to learn. It is reasonable to assume that even a genius continues to learn in their early twenties.

And there is Michelangelo.

Michelangelo was beaten up for wanting to become an artist

We need to dispel several myths to appreciate what follows. There was no ‘art’ as we understand it today in Italy when Michelangelo was born. One did not paint or carve for pleasure, only when commissioned by the Church to create visuals of Scripture, or by lords to express their power.

Image makers were craftsmen, not artists. Leonardo da Vinci listed his ability to design killing machines because that was what his prospective boss needed. Michelangelo’s father, Lodovico, was from the lower nobility and hoped his son would honor the family’s name by pursuing a prestigious career.

The father’s mistake was to send the toddler to a foster mother who was married to a stonecutter. That is from her milk, Michelangelo later said, that his destiny flowed. At 7, his father sent him to grammar school, but the child was more interested in drawing. One of his comrades was an assistant to the great master of the day, Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Ghirlandaio noticed the child’s talent as a draughtsman. That only angered Michelangelo’s father.

His father and his uncles, who held the art in contempt, were much displeased, and often beat him severely for it: they were so ignorant of the excellence and nobility of art that they thought shame to have her in the house.

After half a dozen years of conflict and beatings, the father realized he could make money from his son’s skills. He persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay him to secure his son's admission to his studio. A master paying to get an assistant, instead of the other way around! Michelangelo was 13.

How teenage Michelangelo set out to carve Hercules, a life-size marble

A master’s studio was the art school where a young apprentice like Michelangelo was expected to spend three years learning the craft of producing images. But Michelangelo did not wait that long. The scene is the Medici’s garden and its prestigious collection of antique statues.

Michelangelo was 14 years old.

After only a few days, Michelangelo began copying with a piece of marble the antique head of an old and wrinkled faun with a damaged nose and a laughing mouth, which he found there.

Although Michelangelo had never before touched marble or chisels, the imitation turned out so well that Lorenzo was astonished.

Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’ took the youngster under his wing, as his own son, into his home. Michelangelo’s father’s reaction was to say that he “would never suffer his son to be a stonemason.”

Young Michelangelo went on to carve two marble reliefs. But Lorenzo died, and the ‘stonemason’ had to return to his father’s home. What did Michelangelo do, aged 17 or 18? He had never carved a life-size, free-standing marble before, and purchased a large block of marble at a low price because it had been damaged by rain.

Of his own accord, he carved a statue of Hercules 2,3 meters (7,7 ft) tall. To say it is unprecedented does it no justice. First, how can a teenager decide to create a larger-than-life marble as a first attempt? Second, it had been a thousand years since anyone had attempted to make figures in the manner of ancient Greece and Rome.

Imagine that as a teenager, Michelangelo’s ambition was to equal the masters of Antiquity...

From Hercules to David

Why did Michelangelo choose these figures? For David, it was a commission by the Church, not Michelangelo’s choice. For Hercules, the boy whom his father deemed a ‘stonemason,’ did not act as a craftsman waiting for a paid job; he chose to buy a stone and carve it. It must be repeated, this is unprecedented.

It was likely an homage to Lorenzo the Magnificent, begun soon after his death, and was displayed for a while in the Medici Palace. But there is a far deeper link between the two statues, as they both represent facets of Florence.

Hercules, the ‘pagan’ hero, had long been a civic symbol of Florence’s might; it even adorned the city’s seal. David, a Biblical figure, doubled as Florence’s moral virtue in its struggle against its enemies. It is not a stretch to say they are twins.

Note that Michelangelo’s David is not a youthful figure but an adult, heroic nude, like Hercules. There is not even a Goliath’s head, only the sling to know this is David.

While the marble Giant—David, also known as Il Gigante—needs little introduction, did you know, dear reader, that Michelangelo sculpted two Davids? The marble Giant had a ‘little brother’ in bronze, of a different design.

Michelangelo’s bronze David

Marble is heavy and brittle, and with the marble David, the space between the legs was already carved; the block was shallow, so Michelangelo had very little freedom to compose his masterpiece. In bronze, there was no limit as to what Michelangelo could do.

The David was erected in the year 1504; this statue brought great fame to Michelangelo in the art of sculpture, and, as a result, he cast an extremely beautiful David in bronze.

Yet the commission was not ‘carte blanche’, allowing Michelangelo to do whatever he wanted; it was supposed to be a copy of a famous bronze David as a political gift to a French marshal. One Michelangelo sketch probably depicts the bronze David. On that paper, Michelangelo wrote:

David with the sling, and I with the bow.

A reference to having vanquished the giant piece of marble? One biographer tells us that Michelangelo finished the Giant in only eighteen months... The bronze took six years; Michelangelo lost interest and moved on, and the work was completed by someone else.

Even when finished by another artist, the bronze was still deemed not only beautiful but “extremely beautiful.” Since the marble David is one of the greatest artworks ever made, where is Michelangelo’s bronze David? And what about Hercules?

Hold on tight, this is the tale of losing not just one, but two Michelangelo masterpieces.

Michelangelo’s Hercules goes to France

How do you lose a marble Michelangelo, you may ask? And how did it end up in Fontainebleau, France? It was an era of near-constant French invasions of Italy. King Francis I, who had invited Leonardo da Vinci to France, was keen to get his hands on a Michelangelo statue.

To keep him on board, Florence facilitated the sale of Hercules, and the marble sailed towards France. It took many years for it to arrive at Fontainebleau, then the most prestigious French castle, where the statue had pride of place, as shown on the map above.

See the square garden alongside the pond in the image above? In its center was the Hercules statue. We have a clear description of it, from 1642:

What is particularly remarkable in this garden is a most beautiful and large white marble statue, representing Hercules, that the past King had found in this castle and had raised on a pedestal. It is by Michelangelo.

A ‘most beautiful’ Michelangelo. Another witness states

A beautiful garden in the middle of which, on a pedestal, was the white marble statue of Hercules, by the hand of Michelangelo.

What happened? At the end of Louis XIV’s reign, the garden was redesigned, a polite word for completely destroyed. Marble and limestone fragments were reused to pave a new courtyard. Twenty years later, an inventory mentions, in the castle’s reserves:

Four marble antique figures, coming from the destroyed jardin de l’Etang, all in pieces.

Michelangelo’s Hercules in pieces, lost in Fontainebleau’s garden

Marble statues from the destroyed garden, precisely the one where Hercules used to be, ‘all in pieces’. It is time for a confession, dear reader. I long dreamed—hoped—that Hercules was still at the bottom of the pond, admired by carps.

Yet, I had the opportunity to ask officials from Fontainebleau about that. They shared that dream and explained that the pond had been drained, and nothing had been found... It is not as if they are not conducting archaeological excavations; they even found, in another part of the castle, a royal gold pin.

While I was looking at the pond, thinking of fish silently admiring the statue’s fragments, little did I imagine I was trampling Michelangelo’s broken masterpiece... Short of a miracle, it seems that Michelangelo’s first masterpiece ignominiously ended up being broken up to pave a courtyard in Fontainebleau’s castle.

Michelangelo’s bronze David travels to France

Now, what happened to the bronze David? It first ended in a Loire Valley castle, where we have this description, in 1532.

Triumphantly, our beautiful and great bronze David in the middle of this castle; with a description of the verses by Michelangelo written on the base of the statue. A poet also praised the statue, stating that “any sculptor says that it is worth its weight in gold, such is the quality of the cast”.

Keep the image of ‘its weight in gold’ in mind. The bronze David was later moved to another castle near Paris. And the Revolution happened. The lord of the castle was made to try a new invention: the Guillotine. His castle was seized.

Now, the French Revolution marks the peak of the Enlightenment era, the age of revolutions, and the birth of the Louvre Museum.

It was an era of both destruction and preservation. Churches and castles were destroyed, while experts roamed the countryside in search of tapestries, statues, and paintings worthy of the Louvre Museum. Hold on tight now.

Michelangelo’s bronze David returned to Italy at high speed

In 1794, the first inventory correctly described the statue:

A life-size bronze figure, representing David holding the head of Goliath under his foot, by Michelangelo.

And the following year, when the castle’s contents were sold at auction, the same statue was listed without the label ‘Michelangelo’. That word made all the difference. On one side was ‘art’ worthy of the museum. On the other side, anything considered a construction material: the castle was broken off and sold, stone by stone, to local contractors.

What would you do with a bronze statue? A law mandated that all bronze statues and reliefs depicting tyranny be melted down and recast as cannons. Napoléon Bonaparte prepared the invasion of Italy. Paris’s cannon factory purchased all the metal it could, which is where the statues of tyrants ended. And, most likely, Michelangelo’s David.

Michelangelo’s bronze masterpiece was returned to Italy, cast into cannons, and fired at high speed.

A Michelangelo turns up in New York, hiding in plain sight

Now we’ve seen the fateful consequence of losing the label ‘Michelangelo’, we can ponder what happens when a statue is forgotten and then rediscovered. A statue was offered for sale at an auction in 1902. In the first catalogue, it is correctly described as by Michelangelo, and ‘an extraordinary piece’.

But once in London, it was downgraded as not by Michelangelo and failed to sell. So, it ended as another garden statue, decorating the entrance of the Whitneys’ mansion on Fifth Avenue, hiding in plain sight.

The mansion became the office of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. The statue was not entirely forgotten; an Italian art historian knew of it from the sales catalogue but did not know it was on Fifth Avenue. And for thirty years, art historian Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt walked past.

One evening in 1996, she stopped for a good look, realizing it could be a young Michelangelo’s statue. In the years that followed, the Metropolitan Museum and specialists came to agree that it is by Michelangelo.

So, it crossed the street and is on long-term loan to the Met, the only Michelangelo statue on the American continent.

Now comes the moral of our story. Please do not turn a Michelangelo marble statue into pavement, or a bronze one into cannons. Then, pay attention: at the back of the garden, in the attic, or even hidden in plain sight, there may be a masterpiece waiting to be rediscovered.

Which is how, dear reader, if you have been a good boy or girl, there may be a lovely Christmas gift hiding somewhere, and quite a Moment of Wonder.

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Sources

Ascanio Condivi: Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti (Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti).

Vasari, Vite.

Père Dan, Le Trésor des merveilles de la maison royale de Fontainebleau,.

Abbé Guibert, Description historique du château, bourg et forêt de Fontainebleau, Tome 2, Paris 1731.

Félix Herbet, Le château de Fontainebleau : les appartements, les cours, le parc, les jardins, Paris : Librarie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1937.

Paul Joannides, “Michelangelo’s Lost Hercules.” Burlington Magazine 119, no. 893 (Aug. 1977).

Inventaire des objets d’art composant la succession de Florimond Robertet, ministre de François Ier, dressé par sa veuve le 4e jour d’août 1532 - Notice par Eugène Gresy

Le David de bronze de Michel-Ange au château de Villeroy, Nicole Duchon, Mennecy et son histoire, revue de l’association n° 48, juin 1996.

https://villa-albertine.org/frenchculture/press/cupid-on-loan-at-the-met-for-another-10-years/

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/236774

Moments of Wonder

Sitting On A Leonardo da Vinci Painting

Following the story of a Vincent van Gogh painting used as a chicken coop door, a Leonardo da Vinci painting used as a stool and the lid of a chest…

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a year ago · 3 likes · Moments of Wonder

The myth that Vincent van Gogh died unrecognized is false

The enduring legend of Vincent van Gogh is one of tragedy: a mad genius, a lonely artist who committed suicide, having sold only a single painting, and whose modest dream of displaying his art in a café never came to pass.

This could not be further from the truth. Vincent van Gogh exhibited in his own lifetime not only in cafés but also in four major art exhibitions in Paris and Brussels.

He received a dozen newspaper mentions, including one that called him “a rare genius.” His peers, including Monet, recognized that a new talent had emerged.

Thanks to a dive into original French sources rarely, if ever, translated into English, we will here reveal the documented facts of Van Gogh’s lifetime successes, proving that reality often is more fascinating than fiction.

Within one year of his arrival in Paris, van Gogh exhibited in cafés

Vincent arrived in Paris in spring 1886 to stay with his brother Theo. A few months later, he mentions having found dealers already:

At this present moment I have found four dealers who have exhibited studies of mine. And I have exchanged studies with several artists.

Now the prices are 50 francs. Certainly not much but, as far as I can see one must sell cheap to rise, and even at costing price.

Exhibiting with art dealers does not yet mean selling, but it is a step in the right direction.

Le Tambourin exhibition and disaster foreclosure sale

Now, for the first time translated into English, is Vincent’s good friend Émile Bernard’s description of the display at the first café exhibition, at Le Tambourin, on the boulevard at the foot of Montmartre.

Around a hundred of Vincent’s canvases hung on the walls, the overall impression of the room derived directly from him, and it was a cheerful, vibrant, harmonious impression.

But Le Tambourin was losing money and was foreclosed. Vincent’s paintings were on the walls and became part of the foreclosure auction. Translated into English for this story:

It went on for several months, then the establishment declined, was sold, and all those paintings were put into a heap and auctioned off for a pittance.

The pittance is estimated to have been “between fifty cents to one franc per bundle” of ten canvases. It meant that one could purchase ten van Goghs for the value of one blank canvas. It is no surprise that about 100 paintings from the Parisian period were scraped off and resold as blank canvases.

The Grand-Bouillon Restaurant Exhibition

Vincent turned into an exhibition curator, organizing a show for fellow painters and himself. He explained about both café exhibitions:

The exhibition of Japanese prints that I had at the Tambourin had quite an influence on Anquetin and Bernard, but it was such a disaster.

For the 2nd exhibition at the showroom on boul. de Clichy, I have fewer regrets about the time and effort. Bernard having sold his first painting there, Anquetin having sold a study there, and I having made the exchange with Gauguin, we all got something.

Vincent’s dear friend Émile Bernard describes how this was also a failure:

There was a violent altercation between the owner and Vincent, which made Vincent decide to take a hand-barrow without delay and cart the whole exhibition to his studio in rue Lepic.

Was Vincent a poor and struggling artist?

When you read that Theo sent his brother an allowance of 100 to 150 francs, it sounds, today, like pocket money. Yet in the 1880s, a laborer made about 120 francs a month, a seamstress 60 francs a month, for at least 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.

In other words, Theo gave Vincent roughly the minimum wage. And Theo did that for ten years, investing about 20% of his income in his brother’s career. Vincent then spent 80% of what Theo gave him on art supplies, leaving little for boarding and food.

Vincent van Gogh exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants and at ‘Les XX’ in Brussels

The official Salon refused Manet, Monet, Renoir, and many others, prompting the 1874 self-organized show that gave birth to the Impressionist movement. A dozen years later, artists created the Salon des Indépendants, without a jury actively working to ruin their careers.

To imagine what they looked like, think of the temporary exhibitions in Parisian gardens or on the Champs-Élysées today. Vincent van Gogh’s paintings were exhibited at the 1888, 1889, and 1890 Salon des Indépendants.

Furthermore, the fourth exhibition was held in Brussels at Les XX, the Belgian equivalent of the Indépendants Salon. Being exhibited meant that artists and critics started to take note.

Vincent van Gogh received praise in his lifetime from poets and critics

For the 1889 exhibition, Vincent is deemed “a remarkable hero”:

But who is the interpreter of the dazzling, stormy life of the nineteenth century? Who becomes conscious of it in form and colour? I know one, a unique pioneer: he stands alone, struggling in the great night, his name, Vincent, is for posterity.

With ten paintings on display at the 1890 Salon, there are more reviews. Some by imbeciles:

If Mr. Vincent van Gogh sees nature as he paints it, we pity him. He must find it quite ugly.

Mr. Van Gogh paints his landscapes, and that is his excuse, in an asylum.

But others that were glowing.

What a great artist! ... Extraordinary power of expression... There are ten Vincent van Gogh paintings at the Indépendants that attest of a rare genius.

Then there is a six-page article so beautiful it deserves a story of its own. The poet and critic Albert Aurier wrote a superb endorsement of Vincent’s talent.

Vincent van Gogh is indeed not only a great painter, he is also a dreamer, an exalted believer, a devourer of beautiful utopias living on ideas and dreams.

The poet then asks about the odds of Vincent being recognized.

Vincent van Gogh is at once too simple and too subtle for the bourgeois spirit of our time. He will never be fully understood except by his brothers, the very artistic artists...

In his letters to Vincent, Theo tells him of the recognition he is gaining:

Many people came up to ask me to give you their compliments. Gauguin said that your paintings are the key to the exhibition.

You have a real success among the artists.

Fellow artists, including Monet and Gauguin, praised Vincent

Gauguin wrote to Vincent to say:

I offer you my sincere compliments, and for many artists you are the most remarkable in the exhibition.

And Theo wrote to repeat Monet’s compliment:

Monet said that your pictures were the best in the exhibition.

Vincent van Gogh did sell more than one painting

Let us not forget that Vincent came from an art-dealing family. His uncles were art dealers, and he worked as a salesperson in art galleries in the Netherlands, Paris, and London. Theo was, of course, an art dealer.

Aside from the disastrous auction at which his paintings sold for one franc per bundle of ten, Vincent traded paintings for supplies or sold them to bric-a-brac dealers, who resold them as blank canvases.

Then there is Père Tanguy’s wife’s portrait, which Vincent acknowledges in a letter was sold for 20 francs, enough to invite friends to a nice dinner. Since the picture of Mère Tanguy has never been found, perhaps it was scraped off as well…

A few months later, Theo sold a self-portrait of Vincent. This is known from an invoice that Theo sent to British dealers. The invoice, for two paintings, states:

A landscape by Camille Corot, and a portrait of himself by V. van Gogh.

The fate of that painting is unknown. At the Brussels exhibition, Vincent finally made a modest sale: a canvas for 400 francs, not a large amount but equivalent to over two months of wages for the average worker.

The end under a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold

Vincent spent the last two months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise. One afternoon, alone in a field, Vincent shot himself. What he previously wrote about The Sower eerily foreshadowed his end.

But in this death nothing sad, it takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold.

Vincent’s last letter, the day of the suicide:

Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it.

Theo describes the end:

One of his last words was: this is how I wanted to go and it took a few moments and then it was over and he found the peace he hadn’t been able to find on earth.

Vincent van Gogh’s staggering creativity and resilience

One should contemplate Vincent’s stylistic evolution over a short period and his productivity despite the difficulties. Let us summarise Vincent’s career, discounting the many lost paintings.

- In the Netherlands, in five years, he painted about 245 paintings—4 per month.

- In Paris, in two years, 227 paintings—10 per month.

- In Arles, in 14 months, 189 paintings—14 per month.

- Saint-Rémy, in one year at the asylum, including the four months when crises prevented him from working, he painted 143 canvases—about 18 per month when able to work.

- In Auvers-sur-Oise, in 70 days, he painted 74 canvases. That’s over one per day.

Since time travel is impossible, we cannot attempt to stop Vincent from taking his own life. Yet, what we can do is stop diminishing the man by repeating that he was mad and died an unrecognized failure. We should instead take some comfort in the fact that he did not die without knowing that he was appreciated.

After all, the pioneers born a dozen years earlier, Monet, Renoir, and Rodin, had to wait a long time for recognition and financial success. Vincent was on the verge of a breakthrough, which only makes committing suicide more tragic.

That man was a powerhouse of sensitivity and productivity: over the course of five years, while Monet painted 280 canvases, Vincent painted over twice as many. In the last two months, he created one masterpiece per day.

Vincent van Gogh left knowing he was appreciated, and became eternal through his art

In the face of doubt, crises, and guilt at being a drag for his brother, he kept going until he could not take it any longer. A wake was held at the inn, decorated with Vincent’s paintings. Sunflowers and yellow dahlias covered the coffin. Allow me to translate Vincent’s dear friend Émile Bernard's words:

The sun was scorching as we climbed the hills of Auvers, talking about him, the thrust he gave to art, the great projects he always had in mind, and about the good he did for each of us.

Docteur Gachet wanted to say a few words, but he was weeping so much that he could only say a confused farewell. He was, he said, an honest man and a great artist; he had only two aims: humanity and art.

It is art, which he cherished above all else, that will keep him alive...

Behind the myth of the failure was a great artist who strived for humanity and art. His art made him eternal, and that’s the Moment of Wonder.

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Sources

Translated from French for this story by the author:

Émile Bernard, article pour le Moderniste in Émile Bernard 1868-1941 : A Pioneer of Modern Art.

Lettre d’Émile Bernard à Albert Aurier, Paris, Jeudi 31 Juillet 1890.

Émile Bernard, Vincent van Gogh, Mercure de France, 1er Avril 1893.

G.-Albert Aurier, « Les Isolés, Vincent van Gogh », Mercure de France, t. I, n° 1, janvier 1890.

Le Mercure de France, Mai 1890, Julien Leclercq; Beaux-Arts, aux Indépendants.

La Lanterne, 21 mars 1890

Le XIXe siècle, 21 mars 1890.

Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh : 1887-1888 : lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées / Victor Merlhès.

“Destin de ses tableaux”, François Duret-Robert, Van Gogh,Camille Bourniquel, 1968.

Martin Bailey, Van Gogh’s first sale: a self-portrait in London Apollo (London. 1925), 1996-03, Vol . 143 (409), p.20-21.

Martin Bailey, Is a Van Gogh self-portrait hidden in a London attic?

How Many Paintings Did Vincent Sell during His Lifetime?

https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let569/letter.html#translation

https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let640/letter.html#translation

https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let718/letter.html

https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let800/letter.html

https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let858/letter.html#translation

https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let860/letter.html

https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let862/letter.html

https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/RM25/letter.html#translation

Theo van Gogh. Letter to Elisabeth van Gogh. Written 5 August 1890 in Paris.

Joseph Jacob Isaacson, in ‘Parijsche Brieven III’, De Portefeuille*, 17 August 1889 and https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let815/letter.html

Vincent van Gogh par Théodore Duret.

Émile Bernard, Le Père Tanguy, Mercure de France, 16 Décembre 1908.

Lettres de Vincent van Gogh à Émile Bernard.

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When Vermeer fell into art history’s dustbin

You may find it difficult to believe, dear reader, but the world-famous Girl with a Pearl Earring sold at auction in 1881 for the equivalent of $ 35...

Vermeer is not the only great artist who fell into complete oblivion not long after his death, only to be rescued from the shadows by art historians and collectors. There will be more in the future, but here we discuss Vermeer.

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring sold for 2 guilders and 30 cents

The Vermeer exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum became the museum’s most successful ever, attracting 650,000 visitors from around the world. It was a sensation, bringing together for the first time 28 of the 37 works by the artist.

And 100,000 visitors returned home with the catalogue that they purchased for 35 euros. If the time machine existed, and they could all travel to 1881, imagine the stampede at the auction house! For the price of their beautiful catalogue, they could have purchased Girl with a Pearl Earring and still have spare change.

How could this be? Let’s use the poetic time machine and turn back the clock.

Vermeer, one of many artists of the Golden Age of Dutch art

To understand the originality of the Golden Age of Dutch art, remember, dear reader, that for centuries, painters were commissioned by the Church, a King, or an Emperor. For example, the great Flemish painter Rubens spent three years working on immense paintings for the Queen of France.

But the artistic situation was very different in the Protestant Dutch Republic. There were no Kings to put on a pedestal, and no interest in large-scale church paintings. Global trade made the Republic very wealthy, and the middle class could afford to commission artworks.

Their preference was for private devotion, interior scenes, and portraits. Smaller works, in larger quantities, for a broader art market, which meant less financial security for artists. Rubens lived like a prince, Rembrandt did too, for a while, until it all came crashing down.

Yet, unlike Vermeer, Rembrandt never spent time in the ‘forgotten artist’ corner. Why? To begin with, Rembrandt produced about 300 paintings. He also took in at least 50 students, who learned to paint in the ways of their master.

Not only were many Rembrandts sold across Europe, but also many ‘wannabe Rembrandts’ by his students. Even if a meteorite had fallen from the sky onto an exhibition featuring all of Rembrandt’s paintings, he would still be remembered through his followers.

By contrast, Vermeer produced an average of only two paintings per year and apparently never took in students.

Vermeer of Delft

Because Vermeer was forgotten for a long time, we know little about him. A summary of what is known: he was active for 20 years. At 20, he inherited his father’s inn and art-dealing business.

He was accepted into the city’s painters’ guild and ended up leading it. He sold his own paintings to a restricted social circle in Delft. Their contemplative, quiet world may have doubled as a distraction for a father of fourteen children.

It is likely he last put paint to canvas aged 40. The year was 1672, and Louis XIV’s armies invaded the Netherlands. In Versailles, the war is depicted as a great success. For the Dutch, it was the Disaster Year.

It put an end to the Golden Age, as the economic collapse relegated commissioning art to the bottom of the list of essential purchases. And Vermeer still had eleven children to feed.

Vermeer’s career ended in bankruptcy and oblivion

Three years after the devastating war, Johannes Vermeer died at 43. His widow, Catharina, exchanged two paintings for three years’ worth of bread to pay the debt owed to the baker.

But she was overwhelmed by debtors, so an inventory was done in preparation for bankruptcy. Catharina’s plea to her debtors survives:

During the ruinous war with France he not only was unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in.

As a result and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead.

With few paintings produced and no students to spread his style, Vermeer fell into oblivion. It is estimated that Vermeer painted between 45 and 50 works, of which 37 are accepted as surviving today.

From different inventories, we have descriptions of several missing paintings. The most distressing loss is a self-portrait:

The portrait of Vermeer in a room with various accessories, uncommonly beautiful painted by him.

The painting above by Musscher is believed to have been inspired by Vermeer’s lost self-portrait. Compare it to Vermeer’s Art of Painting, and weep.

The Sphinx of Delft, Vermeer, finally rediscovered

Vermeer was forgotten for about 200 years, to the point that his paintings often sold under other artists’ names. But he starts to resurface in 1792, when a French art dealer wrote:

This van der Meer, about whom historians have said nothing, deserves special attention. He is a very great painter in the manner of Metzu.

His works are rare and better known and appreciated in Holland than anywhere else.

Vermeer, a very great painter! But saying ‘in the manner of Metsu’ shows the effect of not having had students: being considered a follower more than a master. An important distinction is that, as the master invents a new style, the follower copies it.

Then Vermeer’s View of Delft stopped an art historian in his tracks. Théophile Thoré-Bürger made it his mission, in numerous articles in the 1860s, to resurrect Vermeer.

Here comes another great artist, an incomparable original, an unknown genius, Jan van der Meer.

What do we know of the man? Almost nothing. No one can answer questions about the biography of this provocative sphinx.

That is where the nickname ‘the Sphinx of Delft’ came from. Sphinx, as a mysterious creature, so little was known about Vermeer’s works and career.

Turning down the gift of Vermeer’s Lacemaker

You would think that, now that the art world has started to realize Vermeer’s importance, museum curators would swim through crocodile-filled rivers to get their hands on The Lacemaker? And you would be wrong.

We are in 1869, in Rotterdam. Dirk Vis Blokhuyzen, a board member of Rotterdam’s museum and major art collector, is trying to donate his art collection to the city. It included Dürers, Rembrandts, and Vermeer’s The Lacemaker.

He asked that 50,000 guilders be given to his heirs, which was well below the collection’s value. And the city council turned down the offer. Thank you, but no. That is how The Lacemaker ended in the Louvre. Merci!

Now, what happened with Girl with a Pearl Earring?

The resurrection of a masterpiece in a ‘deplorable state of neglect’

We are in 1881, in Amsterdam, at the Notaries’ Auction House. One of the lots for sale is in a ‘deplorable state of neglect,’ listed as by an ‘unknown painter’.

Two friends walk past. One is named Victor de Stuers, and he knows painting very well, as he’s an influential cultural official. The other is named Arnoldus Andries des Tombe, an officer and art collector.

It was de Stuers who had a good hunch that this yellowed tronie (a character portrait) in bad condition might be a Vermeer. He convinced his friend to buy it and promised not to bid against him.

Which is how the faded painting sold for 2 guilders, plus 30 cents of commission, the equivalent of $35 today. Once cleaned, Vermeer’s signature appeared.

An art historian friend named Abraham Bredius visited des Tombe’s home, and said:

Vermeer overshadows all the rest; the girl’s head, so superbly modelled that one is almost inclined to forget one is looking at a painting, and that single gleam of light, will alone hold your attention.

Bredius later became director of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague.

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, a priceless gift

Des Tombe died in 1902. While he was a modest man, his will revealed that he offered his entire art collection, twelve paintings, to the Mauritshuis, no strings attached.

And that included Girl with a Pearl Earring—the painting he bought for 2 guilders and 30 cents. That was how art historians and collectors rescued Vermeer’s legacy and artworks.

Today, Girl with a Pearl Earring is an icon, a bit like Mona Lisa’s little sister. Remember that the ‘male Mona Lisa’, Salvator Mundi, sold for $ 450 million. The Vermeer is not priceless; if put up for sale today, it may well push Salvator Mundi off its perch.

Granted, in 1902, a Vermeer wasn’t worth anywhere near these staggering sums. The Concert stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 is worth nothing if destroyed. The reward for its safe return is $10 million, so, logically, a painting’s great value protects it.

We can also hope that a few of the missing Vermeers are gathering dust in someone’s attic and will resurface one day. In the meantime, the majority of surviving Vermeers are held in museums, where most of us can see them. And that is thanks to people like Arnoldus Andries des Tombe.

There is a famous advertisement for a credit card company that says, “There are some things money can’t buy.” One of them is class, like gifting Girl with a Pearl Earring to a museum. Not for tax rebates or to get one’s name on the door, but for no other reason than other people’s enjoyment.

There’s the priceless Moment of Wonder.

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Sources:

Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, La Galerie des peintres flamands, hollandais et allemands volume 2, translated by the author.

Galerie d’Arenberg à Bruxelles, avec le catalogue complet de la collection De Willem BÜRGER (Théophile Étienne Thoré-Bürger); 1858, translated by the author.

Rijksmuseum exhibition catalogue.

Mauritshuis:

-How much is The Girl worth?

-Background check.

-Johannes Vermeer; Girl with a Pearl Earring.

High definition image of Girl with a Pearl Earring.

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How far back in time can we go in a museum?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I keep explaining that museums are time machines and that walking through museum corridors is stepping into the past. Fresh from writing about the world’s oldest portraits, I asked myself how far we could go back in museums.

Surprisingly, the answer involved a trip down memory lane, reviving childhood Moments of Wonder.

Time travel might begin with childhood memories

Your intrepid art historian never willingly went to museums as a kid, but he was an avid reader of bandes dessinées. The ‘comic book’ English translation doesn’t do them justice; they are not just kids’ books but are considered an art form.

The pages you see here are where this adventure started, dear reader. Because, aside from the flying dinosaur waking up from a 136-million-year slumber to terrify Parisians, the museum depicted is very much real.

The story takes place in early 1900s Paris, involves Adèle, a journalist, and includes resurrected Egyptian mummies, an Assyrian demon, and a Parisian pyramid... It is fair to say it must have had an impact on the impressionable mind of one little boy.

Not only that, but I was brought to the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris on a school trip, one of the overexcited kids let loose around a gigantic skeleton-marching army.

While I had absolutely no idea how old they were, I remembered the flying-dinosaur story and being spooked by weird specimens, skeleton giants, and two-headed animals in glass jars.

That was why, in that quest to find out how far back in time one can go in a museum, I realized I had to walk into my own childhood footsteps.

Adventure and time travel are around the corner

There’s no need to don an Indiana Jones hat and head to the jungle to go on an exploration. Adventure awaits around the corner, as long as your eyes and mind are ready.

I had not returned to the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle since that school trip. It is only half an hour from my home, and I have passed by many times, but never thought of returning.

Until I decided to push the door, finding myself nearly alone in the Muséum.

Time travel before dinosaurs roamed the Earth

The adventure began with the creak of my steps on the floorboard. I headed straight to the top floor in search of the museum’s oldest piece. Of course, I stopped by for a look at the dinosaurs, with the basic knowledge that these guys died out 65 million years ago.

With a glance at museum labels, I got a reminder that they ruled Earth for about 165 million years... Think about that for a moment. History was born with the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, which is less than the blink of an eye in comparison.

But was 250 million years as far as I could travel that day? No, as in this museum, two or three steps can take you back over 100 million years. Look at this menacing-looking guy below.

Everyone knows that T-Rex was the apex predator in the Jurassic. But this guy above ruled Earth 100 million years before T-Rex terrified anyone. This placoderm was, at the time animal life was confined to the sea, the most fearsome creature on earth. He may not have had teeth like a T-Rex, but he was a swimming assault tank.

His head was made of armor plating, so he did not bother with slicing meat like a shark; he just snapped his prey in half. Good thing, I said to myself, these creatures are long dead; otherwise, I would never come close to the sea.

But we are here to assess how far back in time we can travel in this museum, so we now turn to small things.

Tiny but mighty 500-million-year-old molluscs

Before Jurassic Park and Hollywood, there was no life on land; it all happened in the oceans. These two rocks contain the remains of modest little shells. But the sense of wonder comes when reading the label: between 504.5 and 497 million years old.

We can round that up to 500 million years, as another species of molluscs below.

If we jump forward by ‘just’ 50 million years, we have a sea scorpion, found in Buffalo, New York State.

Now we have the first part of our quest: how far can we travel in a museum? In this one by the Seine River, the answer is 500 million years.

As the shells above came from Wisconsin or New York State, the other facet of museum adventures is that one doesn’t just travel through time but also through space. From the sea to the desert, the present to the past. So, where did this little adventure bring us?

Walk the earth before the age of dinosaurs, 300 million years ago

Ten minutes ago, we were, geographically, in the United States, but 500 million years ago. Within a few meters and minutes, our time machine brings us to Germany, 320 million years ago.

No need to fear the arrival of T-Rex, there are no scary dinosaurs roaming around, yet. But what’s this buzzing sound?

No need to run for the hills; it’s just a giant dragonfly passing by. Oh, and we just casually travelled 170 million years into the future, which is 150 million years in our past...

Next time you walk on the beach, look out for shells; they may be millions of years old

A shell is just like another shell, right? Maybe not, as these pretty shells found on a Normandy beach are about 170 million years old. And if you do not find the presence of shells on a beach impressive, what about these?

They are only about 48 million years old, but they were found near Versailles. Yes, the stone used to build Versailles’ castle, Notre-Dame Cathedral, and most of Paris came from the bottom of the sea.

It is a good thing that this time travel is of the poetic sort, as 48 million years ago, Paris was underwater, and I would need my diving equipment to visit the Muséum.

You don’t need to take my word for it: pay attention next time you visit a monument. Whenever you see tiny shells inside the stones of a building, it is because limestone is made from the accumulated sediment of the sea floor.

See? Adventure and time travel are around the corner.

Existential anguish looking at the primates showcases

But the most existential moment was not pondering the time scale involved with dinosaurs. It came just as I was about to leave, walking past the Primates display cabinet. As expected, there was an assortment of small and large monkey skeletons. One of them was the famous wise chimpanzee Consul.

Around 1900, Consul behaved at the table like a perfect gentleman—impressive feats for a cigar-smoking, cycling chimp. Sorry to disappoint you, but he is not the standing monkey in the glass case.

That one is, scientifically speaking, Homo Sapiens. In layman’s terms, wise man, part of the primates group, which is us, dear reader.

To amaze as a means to educate

Regretfully, I did not come up with this great line; it is the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle’s motto Émerveiller pour instruire. In a mere two hours, I felt like I had learned more than I ever did in science class.

And together, dear reader, we entered a time machine and travelled 500 million years under the sea, and in the desert. So, if we cover 500 million years in two hours, does that not mean we are travelling faster than the speed of light? As I slept through science class, I will let others answer the question.

The point of this story is to prove that odyssey and poetic time travel are around the corner. I genuinely had no idea how far this little adventure would take me, even less that it would end with a cycling, cigar-smoking monkey.

That hopefully illustrates, dear reader, that adventures and Moments of Wonder await whenever you step into a museum.

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Two-thousand-year-old painted portraits that grant eternal life

As we will see here, this is not just poetic licence. Before we enter our time machine, dear reader, and travel 2,000 years back to Egypt, let’s consider the time we’re in. How do you visualize lost family or friends?

Through photography, peering into yellowed photographs and feeling the presence of those who have left this world. Locking eyes with faces in the photo, we enter a dialogue with their souls, cancelling out time, almost as if they were with us, once again.

You could even add perfume or music that helps rekindle memories, and Grandma or Grandpa would almost be there, standing next to you. Billions of us alive today have the privilege of possessing portraits of loved ones.

But, before photography, only royalty or the wealthy had their portraits painted. You may think, dear reader, that the oldest portraits in existence are about 500 years old, dating from the Renaissance.

Not at all, they are up to 2,000 years old and were put on Egyptian mummies. While we think of painting as something to hang on a wall, the main reason for the world’s oldest portraits was to adorn mummies’ faces.

As you probably wonder why painted portraits were put on mummies’ faces, dear reader, here’s a helpful little guide about mummification in Egypt.

Egyptian mummies, beyond movies and scary tales

We turn back the clock, starting with the present. To this day, the fascination with the mysterious dried-out corpses that seem almost alive continues. The first thing many ask when visiting a museum is, “Are there any mummies?”

When the Titanic sank, some people blamed a mummy from the British Museum. At the same time, selected chemists continued to sell Mummy. That came from the centuries when Europeans ate Egyptian mummies.

Yes, ate them —not as exotic food, but as medicine. You read that correctly: those who could afford it ingested ancient corpses, ground into powder, as a cure. Why?

Why were Egyptian mummies eaten as medicine?

Because of a simple mistranslation error: bitumen is called mumiya in Arabic. Bitumen is the black stuff used to pave roads. And the often blackish complexion of Egyptian mummies, due to the oils and resins used in the mummification process, made them look like bitumen.

That is how a natural black, oily substance, bitumen, got confused with blackened corpses, mummies... Around the year 1,000, the famous and influential thinker Avicenna wrote a treatise praising the healing properties of mumiya.

That advice was read by Muslim and European physicians alike, impressed by mumiya’s power to cure abscesses, ulcers, and stomach ailments. Got a migraine? A dose of mumiya for you, Sir. Coughing? You guessed it, mumiya.

There was such demand that Ancient Egyptians were shipped by the boatload to Europe. As there was never enough, both in Egypt and in Europe, the unscrupulous cooked condemned criminals or unfortunate corpses to make them look like ancient Egyptian mummies.

I can not vouch for whether they tasted the same as Egyptian mummies. We must take the word of Ambroise Paré, a great physician from the 16th century:

Mummy infers many troublesome symptoms, as the pain of the heart or stomach, vomiting and stink of the mouth.

The Greeks and Romans were in awe of Egyptian medicine and science. Yet, it is unlikely that Egyptian physicians ever imagined they would be eaten to cure others.

That was practical advice #1: don’t eat mummies —ancient Egyptian or living ones, thank you very much.

Egyptian mummies were used as firewood, fertilizer, or treated like mere objects

Contemplate, dear reader, the lack of trees in Egypt. And the fact that ancient Egyptian mummies had been left to dry in a salt-like substance, then anointed with oils and resins, and wrapped in fine linen. You see where it is going: mummies were perfect burning material.

That is how, after three millennia of Egyptian civilization and religion, amid dreams of treasure and the need for firewood and fertilizer, an untold number of Egyptians briefly lit the night or helped feed the living.

Treating the dead as objects to loot, burn, or eat kept going for a long time. You may not be aware, dear reader, of what really happened to Tutankhamun once Howard Carter discovered him, so hold on tight.

Tutankhamun’s mummy was torn to pieces

Tutankhamun’s body was all ‘glued in’ inside the solid-gold sarcophagus and mask. After three millennia of drying out, the resins and oils poured on Tutankhamun prevented Howard Carter from separating the jewels and mask from the corpse.

With the images above, you may get a sense, dear reader, that poor old Tut must have felt like being thrown into a spinning tumble dryer. In went a solid gold coffin containing a bejewelled Pharaoh; out came a mummified body in fifteen parts, chunks of body missing, and the royal head ignominiously nailed to a plank of wood.

Rough treatment of mummies, royal or otherwise, sadly, was the norm. Forty-five years earlier, as told in “When A Pharaoh’s Mummy Was Taxed As Salted Meat,” a Pharaoh’s mummy, snapped in half, was casually carried around Cairo’s streets as if it were salted meat.

That was practical advice #2: please refrain from treating dead Egyptians as mere objects. One does not need to agree with the ancient Egyptian beliefs to treat the dead with dignity.

This now begs the question, why did the Egyptians mummify their dead?

Explaining the ancient Egyptian mummification

Long before Pharaonic times and the invention of hieroglyphs, there was the landscape. The hot Sahara Desert—an ancient Egyptian word still in use 5,000 years later, desheret—naturally dried out the dead.

The black land—the fertile mud left behind by the Nile flood—was reserved for crops. Who would want to bury their parents in a flooding zone?

The concept of life after death emerged when shifting sands revealed that the desert was preserving the dead. The flood of the Nile turned dry land into fertile fields. Above, the sun entered the afterlife with each sunset and was reborn with each sunrise.

That sense of wonder at the rebirth of the sun each morning and at a lifeless desert becoming lush land thanks to the Nile floods formed the basis for the concept of the afterlife. The practice of artificial mummification improved the natural process; that is how millions of Egyptians became mummies.

To the ancient Egyptians, a mummy is not dead, but alive

That is not only practical advice #3, but the key to our story. To the ancient Egyptians, the mummy is alive. To simplify a complex religious idea, the very same knife used to cut babies’ umbilical cords was used on mummies.

It was used along with the magic formula, granting mummies the ability to live:

You come to life a second time,

You thrive on water, you breathe air,

You drink as your heart desires.

Your eyes are given you to see,

Your ears to hear what is spoken;

Your mouth speaks.

In plain English, it means the mummy can see out, breathe, and hear. Magically, of course. That is why the nesting-doll effect of many coffins atop a mummy, whether in solid gold with Tutankhamun or in cheaper options for others, is meant for the mummy to see out.

That explains why coffins have a face, eyes, a mouth, and ears. It is not just for the living to communicate with the dead, but for those living in the afterlife to contemplate the living.

Hopefully, by now, dear reader, it’s starting to make sense why a painted panel placed on a mummy’s face is like a two-way mirror. We look at the person behind the painting, and they are looking at us.

When the Greek style of painting came to Egypt

A Greek historian, Diodorus, came to Egypt over 2,000 years ago. He explained that Egyptians preserved the appearance of the dead unchanged. The reason was that:

Many Egyptians keep the bodies of their ancestors in costly chambers and gaze face to face upon those who died many generations before their own birth, so that, as they look upon the stature and proportions and the features of the countenance of each, they experience a strange enjoyment, as though they had lived with those on whom they gaze.

That enjoyment is what this story is about. We feel joy and emotions when we gaze at photos of loved ones. In ancient Egypt, the religion held that images, paintings, statues, and mummies were alive.

This is not poetry, but what a Greek visitor reported having seen Egyptians do. The fact that it was a Greek witness also matters to our story. For seven centuries, from the time of Alexander the Great onward, Egypt became multicultural.

The Greek dynasty ruled Egypt until Cleopatra, and then, for the next four centuries, Egypt was part of the Roman Empire, fostering cultural exchange. The gain for Egyptian art was the Greek method of realistic painted portraits, the “Fayum portraits”.

The Fayum painted mummy portraits

The Greek method of encaustic—wax-based paint—able to render transparency effects similar to oil paint began to be used in Egypt during the Roman era. To simplify, from the time of Christ, for about three centuries.

While most Greek and Roman painting masterpieces are forever lost, the dry climate of Egypt preserved them. Most were found from the 1880s onward. Now you are aware, dear reader, how Egyptian mummies have been treated, you may not be surprised to discover what happens next.

In 1887, a French doctor and collector described the find of a cave filled with mummies with painted panels:

Under the head of each mummy was a wooden label bearing an inscription identifying the deceased, his profession, and his place of birth.

The vandals who made this important discovery, surprised by the night and the cold, did not hesitate, in their ignorance, to burn the inscriptions and portraits for three consecutive nights, of which only a few pieces escaped this carnage.

After centuries of ‘carnage’, eating, burning, or shredding mummies into pieces, only around 1,000 painted mummy portraits survive. They are of varying quality, but quite a few of them should rank among the most striking and rarest artworks from Antiquity.

Here’s looking at you, kid

Which is coming to practical advice #4, dear reader. Whenever you get to see one of the “Fayum portraits” in a museum, stop by and lock eyes with the person depicted. Read the label, in case the person’s name was miraculously preserved.

Consider that the painting has been torn from a mummified body, which was unceremoniously discarded. The person’s identity may be missing, as the label, name, age, and occupation are likely lost or shelved. Even so, what is in front of you is not just a painting, but, as previously explained, a two-way mirror.

Egyptians alive as long as 2,000 years ago are looking at you. You are doing what they hoped for: that the living come to visit, and, magically, bring them back to life. There’s the Moment of Wonder.

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Sources

The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity; Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson.

Desheret = desert.

Excavation journals and diaries made by Howard Carter and Arthur Mace

Ambroise Paré, ‘Of Mumia, a discourse of Mumia, or Mummie’, from the Apologie and Treatise of Ambroise Paré, Geoffrey Keynes, London 1951.

The ‘life in the beyond’ formula came from the Tomb of Paheri, in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume II: The New Kingdom.

Note sur des peintures récemment découvertes au Fayoum (ancien nome Arsinoïte), en Égypte séance du 6 mai 1887 Daniel Fouquet - translated and edited by the author.

The Library of History of Diodorus Siculus.

Fayum Mummy Portraits: Striking Ancient Egyptian Paintings.

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6 months ago · 5 likes · Moments of Wonder

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When A Pharaoh’s Mummy Was Taxed As Salted Meat

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Understanding the tragedies that befell medieval cathedrals only makes them more impressive

Seated inside Reims’ cathedral, I was in awe of how a massive stone monument becomes weightless, stretching towards the sky. The other reason I was in a state of wonder was knowing what the cathedral had gone through, which only made the experience more poignant.

During World War I, the German army invaded, bombing and burning several cathedrals, including Reims. Visiting today, you might not even realize the full scope of the tragedy.

This story is not about destruction, but about being an uplifting tale, of medieval cathedrals’ resistance in the face of man’s destructive folly and fire. Rejoice, dear reader, as all the monuments illustrated here still stand and can be admired today.

The 1836 accidental fire of Notre-Dame de Chartres Cathedral

It all started with trying to mend the lead roof of the cathedral on a summer day in 1836. What comes next is an eerie echo of the Notre-Dame fire. Two workers sought shelter from a rainstorm inside the “forest,” the immense wooden roof. And left their portable brazier unattended...

Within 45 minutes of the alarm being raised, the entire roof was gone. Firefighters and the population of Chartres kept trying to tame the flames with water pumps and buckets. The situation kept getting worse by the hour, the wind feeding the fire, and both towers were ablaze.

By midnight, a witness explained (for the first time translated into English):

In the blink of an eye, the base of this enormous cone is nothing more than the crater of a volcano, which spews out twenty columns of fire that shoot up thirty feet from the tower, which is enveloped in its entirety. Suddenly, it forms a brilliant and enormous pyramid of fire.

In the vivid brilliance of its terrifying light, the darkness of night vanishes. The entire city, stripped as if by magic of the gloomy veil that had concealed it, is spontaneously illuminated as if in broad daylight for more than fifteen minutes.

At two in the morning, it looked as if the cathedral, its incomparable stained-glass windows, and the surrounding buildings might be forever gone. Fortunately, by morning, the human chain of firefighters and citizens had saved the cathedral, one bucket at a time.

The 1877 fire of Saint-Étienne de Metz cathedral

Common sense dictates that putting a brasero near roof timbers is not a great idea. What about fireworks lit from a medieval cathedral’s roof?

Unfortunately, this is precisely what happened in 1877. The German Empire had just annexed the Alsace-Lorraine region of France, and Wilhelm I, the Emperor, visited the city for the first time.

While the local council refused to light fireworks on the cathedral’s roof, the Germans went ahead anyway. All seemed fine until four in the morning, with the screams of “fire” and the frantic ringing of the bells.

Soon, firefighters arrived, and the German Emperor watched the tragedy unfold in person. We have a hero in this story, known only by his first name, Roger, a lookout living in the tower. Had the tower’s 9-ton bell fallen, it would have taken the tower with it, and the cathedral would have collapsed like a deck of cards.

Roger shouted from above, “Bring water, we can still save the tower.” Nothing. So he ran down, met a puzzled Emperor who asked how he expected water to be brought up so high when pumped water cannot reach the tower.

Our hero replied, “Very well, let’s organize a human chain inside the tower’s staircase”. One man’s courage and foresight saved a cathedral.

The 1914 German bombing of Notre-Dame de Reims

In 1914, the invading German army bombed and burnt the Reims Cathedral with almost 300 shells shot over several days. Eventually, the bomber’s wish was granted. The wooden scaffold outside the cathedral caught fire, spreading to the roof.

Inside the cathedral, there was a military hospital tending German soldiers, with a Red Cross flag flying above. The floor was covered with bales of hay, which caught fire. The cathedral burned on the outside and inside.

Irreparable damage was inflicted on sculptures that rank among the finest medieval statues ever made. About 85% of the city was destroyed. I visited there a few days ago: the cathedral’s restoration is still ongoing, over 110 years later.

Maybe you knew already, dear reader, of Reims’ bombing in 1914. But there was, sadly, a lot more.

The bombing of Noyon Cathedral and Saint-Quentin Basilica

Another great cathedral, illustrated above, paid a steep price during the First World War. This time, it was not the German army intentionally bombing it, but the French military, in the spring of 1918, bombing the occupied city in a frantic attempt to stop the Germans advancing to Paris.

They did not aim at the cathedral, of course, but the city burned, and the flames reached the cathedral.

In Saint-Quentin, below, the damage was far more extensive than in Reims. What happened?

The city was under German occupation for the duration of the war, and in 1917, after the population had been evacuated, French and British troops bombed it. Fire reached the basilica, one of France’s largest churches. The Germans blamed Allied bombing, while, in turn, the French blamed the invader.

A year later, the city was being liberated. Below is a photo of the pillars of the basilica that had been carved to receive bombs.

It is pretty evident that the intention was the absolute annihilation of an ancient monument. Fortunately, the German army had no time to press the button.

Amiens Cathedral survived two wars

Notre-Dame of Amiens is France’s biggest medieval cathedral, and, like her sisters in the North of France, was subjected to two German invasions, in 1914 and 1940.

Using her about a cathedral is not a typo: many French cathedrals are named Notre-Dame, which means Our Lady. This story, hopefully, helps you, dear reader, to appreciate that the cathedrals whose stories are told here are not mere piles of stone, but living wonders.

While unspeakable horrors happened in trenches not far from Amiens, seven shells fell on the cathedral. Then, during the Second World War, the German army nearly destroyed the historic center of Amiens. And the cathedral still stood.

The question remains, who in their right mind bombs cathedrals?

The accidental fire of Nantes’ Saint-Pierre Cathedral of 1972

Like in Chartres in 1836, well-intentioned but careless work can quickly turn to tragedy. All it takes is one person mending the roof with a blowtorch, and the heartbreaking result is visible above.

Notre-Dame de Paris 2019 fire

By now, dear reader, you may realize that this writer is a Parisian art historian. To tell you the truth, I do not own a TV and was blissfully unaware of what was going on. What puzzled me was receiving many emails from friends and acquaintances in the United States. They all said it was terrible, without saying what was happening, assuming I knew.

So, I went online to one of the major French newspapers and saw a live feed: the spire collapsing, and an immense dark cloud emanating from the cathedral. I screamed ‘No,’ and held my head in despair.

Yet, to my surprise, within five minutes, remembering what happened to Reims, Chartres, and other cathedrals helped me relax. It would be fine, I lied to myself, as I spent the evening watching the live feed.

That is how I saw the flames inside the North Tower in real time. I did not realize how close to disaster it was, but instinctively knew that if a tower were to collapse, the ensuing image would be imprinted in my memory, like it was for New Yorkers on 9/11.

Notre-Dame nearly collapsed

Later, I found out what happened. Usually, firefighters risk their lives to save people, not empty buildings. But Notre-Dame is not a mere edifice. The firefighter General asked for volunteers. His words, which I translated into English, were:

The stakes are very simple. Tomorrow morning, at dawn, will there still be Notre Dame​ towers, or will there be nothing left but a pile of smoking ruins?

Between these two visions, a cathedral still standing or a pile of ruins, there is this operation that risks costing the lives of several dozen firefighters.

A commando of twenty firefighters rushed up to the base of the towers, wearing breathing equipment. It was impossible to extinguish the fire from the outside; the only way to fight it was to enter the inferno. Inside the North tower, 30 ft-high flames burned the wooden structure holding hefty bells.

The firefighters were, in their own words, like matches in front of a dragon—an 800°C (1470°F) monster. Had they reached the towers fifteen minutes later, there would be no Notre-Dame left, and I would never have considered writing an uplifting story about cathedrals surviving flames.

Medieval cathedrals, designed by geniuses, sturdy enough to survive centuries, wars, and fire

Next time you get to wander inside a medieval cathedral in France, in Chartres, Reims, or Notre-Dame de Paris, consider what accidents and men did to them.

Ponder on the fact that the people who designed cathedrals knew they would never see them achieved. They invented new construction techniques and did such amazing work that their cathedrals survived the assaults described here.

Yet, we still use the word Gothic to describe what they did. Here is what the word means:

This manner was the invention of the Goths, for, after they had ruined the ancient buildings, and killed the architects in the wars, those who were left constructed the buildings in this style.

That is how the “monstrous and barbarous” style of medieval cathedrals’ architecture was tarred as “Gothic”.

Would you not agree, dear reader, that the talented architects, engineers, and craftsmen who designed and built magnificent cathedrals that still stand after eight centuries of assaults do not deserve to be called barbarians?

They were not ignorant brutes, but geniuses, as proven by the fact that most of the cathedrals discussed here are World Heritage Sites.

Appreciating both the cathedrals and the people who created, built, and saved them is indeed a Moment of Wonder.

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Sources

Historique de la cathédrale de Chartres : premier appendice, comprenant ses sinistres jusqu’à celui du 4 juin 1836 inclusivement; par M. Lejeune, translated and edited for clarity by the author.

L’incendie de la cathédrale de Metz, L’illustration, 19 Mai 1877.

Vasari on technique; Being the introduction to the three arts of design, architecture, sculpture, and painting. Prefixed to the lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors, and architects.

“La bataille de Notre-Dame”; Général Grasset’s words translated by the author.

Photos: Gallica, Archives départementales de la Somme, Archives du service photographique et cinématographique de la guerre, Wikimedia, Walter Koessler project.

Discover the wonders of Notre-Dame Cathedral and the Sainte-Chapelle with a private guided tour.

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The GEM—the Grand Egyptian Museum—in Giza has just officially opened. Yes, it has been a very long wait. But neither Rome nor the pyramids were built in one day. Was it worth the wait?

Your intrepid art historian went last summer to find out for you, dear reader. So, let’s discover the Grand Egyptian Museum together.

The GEM, a museum with a view of the Pyramids of Giza, the only surviving one of the Seven Wonders of the World

Past articles have illustrated that museums are time-travel machines. This story will be an authentic travel experience, dear reader, assuming you’ve long dreamed of visiting Egypt but have yet to do so. We begin our journey from within the Grand Egyptian Museum, marveling at the view outside.

The museum offers a stunning panoramic view of the only one of the Seven Wonders still standing—the Giza pyramids. The photo introducing this article shows two of the three pyramids, those of Khufu (Cheops) and Khafre (Chephren), poking out of the Sahara Desert.

Yes, Egypt is in Africa. The Nile is a thin line of water carving its way through the Sahara Desert. From that spot, if you turn right and manage to walk across 3,000 miles of sand, you will find yourself on a beach, looking at the Atlantic Ocean.

On the left, there is the modern city of Giza, and then the Nile. Zoom out from above, and you can see the Nile is bordered by green banks on both sides, set within an immense desert. That contrast between the lifeless hot desert and fertile green fields has defined Egypt for millennia.

The GEM, an immense island of relaxation, a cool and quiet haven away from bustling Cairo

Cairo’s old Egyptian Museum opened in 1902. While it has a lot going for it, it barely shelters you from the honking concert outside, and, of course, there is no air conditioning. That is why, to make sense of how the new museum is a significant improvement, we need to set the stage, dear reader, for what it feels like to visit Egypt for the first time.

Cairo is one of the world’s largest cities

Greater Cairo is home to 23 million people. It should not come as a surprise, then, that its traffic is pretty mad. There are even traffic jams at night. How? If you needed to buy shoes late at night, come to Downtown Cairo, which is always buzzing with activity.

You may be overwhelmed by the organized chaos or see its charm. In my case, walking Cairo’s sidewalks on my very first visit to the country, in 1999, revealed a lot about the people who live there.

Egyptians are a welcoming people

Wherever I went, people greeted me with ‘Welcome to Egypt’. I don’t mean people at the hotel desk, but passersby and even drivers who slowed to shout “Welcome” from their car windows.

Like everywhere else, at tourist sites, some people try to take advantage of tourists. Step a bit further and slow down, and the situation will change drastically. One example, I purchased a student’s card at a store and sat down to talk with the shopkeepers.

Result, every single evening of my stay, they invited me to drink fruit juice and to smoke the waterpipe. I was not allowed to pay for anything. So, I confess, I fell in love with Egypt and its people, and have been back regularly ever since.

And I did the stupid things myself, so you don’t have to! I swam in the Nile, and I got a preview of the mummification process by being unprepared for the scorching Egyptian sun. I took the time to experience the magic and charm of Egypt, allowing me to share advice on how to discover the country.

It also means that if you have preconceived ideas about Egypt, let me say there’s probably only one that is true: it can be pretty hot!

Egypt is either cold or warm, with little in between

In winter, when the sun is out, it feels like spring; night is like a change of season, when one needs ski clothes. In summer, it is a hot day and night. But how hot? One summer, a lady advised me to avoid going inside the Great Pyramid at the end of the day. I asked why, and she told me, “Because the walls are wet with sweat...”

Obviously, I did not listen, so when I came out of the pyramid, a guy took one look at me and asked why I swam with my clothes on... That was inside a space with no ventilation, but outside, it is dry heat, and it can easily be above 110°F.

Now you have some idea of what it feels like on the other side of the window overlooking the pyramids. It was scorching hot outside, yet cool enough inside without being too cold. Let’s walk around the museum.

The GEM, a major museum dedicated to one civilization

Before you ask: no, I could not visit the one-third of the museum dedicated to Tutankhamun, as it was not yet ready. Some context: Tutankhamun was a minor Pharaoh who ruled for ten years, dying aged 18 or 19.

There were over 300 Pharaohs during the three millennia of Pharaonic Egypt. Only a handful of royal tombs were found intact or nearly so, like Tutankhamun’s. Sneferu, above, and Khufu and Khafre, present in this photo with their pyramids in the background, built monuments that likely will still stand in four millennia.

It is like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre: there is more to a museum than one masterpiece. In fact, did you know, dear reader, that while all the tombs of the Kings and nobles at Giza had been looted, one was found intact?

Queen Hetepheres I’s intact treasure

While Khufu (Cheops) built the largest stone monument ever, it is probable that his mother’s tomb was looted and then reburied near her son’s pyramid. In 1925, a deep shaft was discovered right in front of the Great Pyramid.

It contained the Queen’s sarcophagus, sealed but empty. And her nearly intact furnishings and jewelry, which, at 4,600 years old, are among ancient Egypt’s most important and rare treasures.

Pharaoh Hatshepsut

No, there is no typo; her title was not Queen, but King. To begin with, the word “Queen” doesn’t even exist in the ancient Egyptian language; the word is “King’s wife.” An important Queen, like Nefertari, may have been called “Great King’s Wife”; it was her husband, Ramses II, who sat on the throne.

Hatshepsut sat on the throne, not as regent, the stepmother of young Thutmose III, but as Pharaoh. She wears a false beard, as the magnificent statue above is that of one of a handful of female Pharaohs among three millennia of Kings.

Since I had not mentioned it previously — hoping the photos did the talking — it must be said that the quality of the displays, lighting, and presentation is top-notch. So was it worth the wait? Yes, a resounding yes.

I did spend an entire day in the museum, and that was before the 5,000 objects of Tutankhamun’s treasure and Khufu’s solar boat were available.

So, you will be glad to know there is a food court inside the GEM, where one can choose a restaurant or café to stop by and recharge for an artistic marathon. With the old museum and the other brand-new museum—the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization—discovering the museums of Cairo easily takes two full days.

If one needs two days for Cairo’s museums, not counting the step-pyramid at Saqqara and the pyramids of Giza, it begs the question: how long does it take to discover Egypt?

Discovering Egypt for a lifetime experience

The romantic cruises of the late 1800s took 50 days to sail from Cairo to Aswan, traveling aboard a dahabiya, a beautiful sailing boat like the one above. Steamboats did the same cruise in 19 days.

It is not possible to do the same thing in four to five days, like most cruises do today, from Luxor to Aswan. The distance from Cairo to Abu Simbel is 750 miles. There is no denying the charm of a Nile cruise, but a ship needs one day to travel the distance covered in one hour by car or train.

In other words, if you come to Egypt to experience its monuments, over a distance of 750 miles and over a three-thousand-year time span, you need time. As it is likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime holiday, you need at least 14 days, ideally 21.

That is the secret to accessing sites such as the one below:

And it is the magic formula for enjoying the pyramids and royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings alone or nearly alone. As for Abu Simbel, it is also possible to experience it alone or nearly alone.

But the only way it is feasible is to have both the time and the experts setting the journey for you.

From the Grand Egyptian Museum to Abu Simbel, a once-in-a-lifetime private tour of Egypt

That is the benefit of my 25 years of travel to Egypt and of my studies in art history and Egyptology. There is no need to take my word for it:

Guillaume, Saber and Saleem did a professional and wonderful job from pick up at airport to drop off at cruise, their knowledge on the ground of the history and what we experienced was paramount and the local knowledge of when and where to be to avoid crowds invaluable in the seamless planning and experience.

I am so impressed with this group I already have 2 or 3 close friends and family I will be meeting in coming weeks wanting to know what our trip was like and to do the same, I think the personalised service and the planning was excellent.

Thank you all was a wonderful experience and hope to be back. Can not speak more highly of this group. I had very high expectations due to the time spent planning the trip and overall cost and will state that both Jane and my expectations where not only met but surpassed.

Again cannot say enough great things about something I waited so long to do and sometimes in these situations your expectations are not met because you have had so much time dreaming, again my expectations met and exceeded, worth every cent and the most disappointing part was flying home.

That wonderful testimony came from a person who had waited 47 years to see Egypt. The focus was on delivering that lifelong dream, not by offering camel rides, but by providing a genuine experience.

A once-in-a-lifetime adventure, a private tour the length of Egypt

Embark on the experience of a lifetime this winter —late 2025 or early 2026 —with a genuine private discovery of Egypt, from Cairo to Luxor, for 2 to 6 visitors.

This is not a regular tour, but a Friends on an adventure, where three experts take care of you from the moment you land in Cairo to the tearful goodbyes in Aswan two to three weeks later.

And it is not a group tour either, meaning there are no set dates you must adapt to.

Please visit the website for more information and illustrations.

Do inquire about setting up a Journey of Wonder, a visit that will become the trip of a lifetime.

Private tour of Egypt from Cairo to Abu Simbel

A once-in-a-lifetime tour of Egypt

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The media has been quick to compare the violent heist of the Louvre Museum’s jewels to the theft of the Mona Lisa. The two could not have been more different. A lone lucky person did one, and the other was an organized gang. So, it is time to burst myths.

The 1911 theft did not result from a master plan, but sheer luck

Vincenzo Peruggia was no great mastermind: he did not make one cent of profit from having stolen the Mona Lisa. He was a contractor who had installed protective glass on the frames of the Louvre paintings. One morning, he arrived at the museum’s employees’ entrance, wearing a worker’s smock.

No one asked him anything. He walked the empty corridors of the Italian masterpieces section and chose a painting at random, for no other reason than that it fit under his jacket.

The only reason Mona Lisa was stolen is that it was small enough to fit under the thief’s coat

Vincenzo Peruggia explained to the Italian police:

On a morning in August, at about 7.30, dressed as a worker in a white linen smock, I went to the Louvre and entered through a back door where workers were also entering.

I followed in and found myself in the Salon Carré, and my choice, with no premeditation, fell on the Gioconda by Leonardo da Vinci.

Here begins the myth-busting: Peruggia did not steal in revenge for Napoléon’s misdeeds. He did not even plan which painting to take. He chose on the spur of the moment, for practical reasons, a painting that fit under his coat; that is all.

The motivation was money, nothing more than a get-rich scheme

As visible in the letter, translated into English for the first time, is what Peruggia wrote to his father after the theft.

But I will be the instigator of this fortune that I have been seeking for a long time and that I have already dreamed about, to become a reality here precisely in Paris; when I arrived the second time, I said (here I will make my fortune, or I will die).

It could not be clearer: the goal was to make a fortune. Peruggia went to London to try to sell the Mona Lisa and then took it to Italy to sell it. He only had two francs in his pocket when the Italian police caught him.

The police's search for the Mona Lisa was stunningly incompetent

The photo above is that of Vincenzo Peruggia’s one-bedroom apartment, and of the cupboard where he kept the Mona Lisa. The police officer who visited the tiny room did not bother to check what was inside.

Aside from stunning incompetence, there probably was a degree of racism involved: the inability to contemplate how a poor, uneducated Italian immigrant could have pulled it off.

Worse, the police had the thief’s fingerprints on the glass of the frame. They already had the fingerprints in their files, and the Louvre curators told them about Peruggia.

The Louvre curators told the police who the thief was

With a very sound argument, the frame was perfectly intact, only someone who knew the frame’s construction could have opened it quickly without damaging it.

The Louvre curators compiled a list of contractors who have recently added glass covers to the Louvre’s paintings. Peruggia was on that list. However, the police also harbored a significant amount of contempt for those who were knowledgeable about the subject, the curators.

Vincenzo Peruggia, nothing but a very lucky chancer

To gain access to the courtyard above, a Louvre employee kindly unlocked a closed door for him. The main door leading to the street was left open and unattended. A quick recap of the number of hurdles in Peruggia’s way:

#1 - Entering the Louvre’s staff entrance: no one asked anything.

#2 - An employee sees him trying to open a locked door and opens it instead of asking what he was doing.

#3 - The door to the street, supposedly closed, was left open, and there was no one manning it to inquire why an employee leaves work in the morning with something under his coat.

#4 - His fingerprints were on the frame’s glass and in police files.

#5 - Police came to his room, but failed to open the cupboard hiding the Mona Lisa.

#6 - The Louvre curators provided the police with a list of the contractors who installed the glass on the frames. One of those names was Peruggia.

Peruggia chose the Mona Lisa at random; he was just astonishingly lucky.

No, the Mona Lisa was not stolen by the Nazis and hidden in salt mines

This is still being repeated, as it is the sort of headline that sells. However, the Louvre was saved from the Nazis thanks to Jacques Jaujard’s foresight and the efforts of the Louvre curators and guards.

Mona Lisa was, in fact, at the top of the list to be removed from the museum on the very day of the declaration of war in 1939.

Now, a story that should be known and repeated: it is not just that the curators and guards lived with the masterpieces, day and night. It is that they were ready to die to protect them. In 1944, the SS took revenge on innocents and massacred its way through provincial France.

They began to burn the castle of Valençay, which housed the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory, Michelangelo’s slaves, and numerous treasures. The curator in charge was Gérald van der Kemp.

With SS guns pointed at him, the body of a shot colleague at his feet, he said the following to the Nazis:

“Monsieur, if Valençay burns, the catastrophe will be as serious as the fire at the Library of Alexandria!”

The officer replied: “Monsieur, we are not here to discuss art history!”

To that, the curator changed strategy and said:

“If Valençay goes up in flames, you will be shot within twenty-four hours! As will anyone who goes to tell Field Marshal Goering that all the treasures of French art had been lost in the flames!”

The Nazi contemplated the argument: your bosses are art thieves, they want these masterpieces, if you burn them, you die. The art historian saved the Louvre’s treasures by frightening a Nazi holding a gun, using the only weapon at his disposal, his mind.

The Mona Lisa theft and the jewels heist: a gigantic failure of imagination

Mona Lisa was stolen by a hapless and lucky thief, who had no intention of damaging the masterpiece. The jewels were stolen by ruthless thieves whose purpose is to destroy them for a quick profit and get rid of the evidence.

But there is one link between the two, a complete lack of foresight. I hate to say it, but as someone very familiar with the Louvre, I have known for years that something bad would eventually happen.

The evidence is the numerous rooms without guards, alarms, or cameras, which makes it easy for something to be damaged or stolen.

It was only a matter of time before a catastrophe would once again bring ridicule to the museum. Now, talking about disasters:

- Notre Dame fire? Lack of funding for security staff: There were only two agents on site, and the call to the firefighters was made too late. Had there been enough staff on site, the call may have been done on time to save Notre Dame’s roof.

- The Louvre jewelry heist? So far, the estimated loss is 88 million euros.

Is it difficult to imagine someone brazen enough to park in front of the Louvre, with an extendable ladder, and walk into the Apollo Gallery with angle grinders?

Maybe, but on a Sunday morning, when there is virtually no chance that contractors would be working, one hopes someone would notice.

Museum thefts: preparing is cheaper than repairing

Consider the 846 million euros spent on Notre Dame’s restoration, and the on-paper value of the 88 million euros’ worth of stolen jewels. Would it not have been cheaper to spend a small portion on upgrading security, both on staff and passive systems?

Mona Lisa is safe, behind bulletproof glass. But the stolen jewels are likely already broken down and melted. The rare and historically significant Mazarin diamonds, along with the other gems, may hopefully survive being recut if the police arrest the bandits in time.

There will be no Moment of Wonder today, just sadness and anger: the jewelry heist could and should have been prevented.

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Sources

https://archiviodistatofirenze.cultura.gov.it/asfi/mostre/io-sono-e-mi-chiamo-peruggia-vincenzo/presentazione

Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting, by Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti.

La piste du miroitier avait été signalée au juge instructeur mais la sureté ne daigna pas se déranger.

M. Leprieur et M. Jean Guiffrey, qui dès le premier jour ont indiqué la bonne piste en signalant à la justice les ouvriers employés à la mise sous verre des tableaux et en fournissant une liste sur laquelle se trouvait le nom de Peruggia.

The Louvre curators who informed the police that the glaziers were prime suspects of the theft of the Mona Lisa were Paul Leprieur, Jean Guiffrey, Pierre Marcel, and Louis Pujalet.

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