morbid pre-Raphaelite trivia
Feb. 3rd, 2003 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny... is there any other kind?
Found this anecdote in the other book I'm reading at the moment (The Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle). It isn't quite as good as Dante Gabriel Rosetti's wombat, but it is rather sweet (for funny values of sweet, I grant you, but still).
Up to and during the nineteenth century, there was a pigment called "mummy." V. popular, made a lovely clear glowing brown. Thing is, it was really made out of, well, mummies. No, really. Ground up mummies. ("Raise your hand if ewwwww," as Buffy says.) So, one day in 1881, Lawrence Alma-Tadema comes across his colorman at work, cheerfully grinding up Egyptian mummies for paint. Alma-Tadema hadn't known what "mummy" was made of, and moreover he'd made his name (according to H. Pringle, who isn't so hot on the accurate details, in case somebody knows better) by painting beautiful Egyptian scenes. Horrified and appalled, he rushes to tell his friend Edward Burne-Jones:
Burne-Jones, too, was stunned. After a moment's thought, he hurried off to his studio and returned with a tube of mummy in hand. He wanted to give it a decent burial. "So a hole was bored into the grass at our feet," noted Georgiana Burne-Jones later, "and we all watched it put safely in, and the spot was marked by one of the girls planting a daisy root above it."
Now I want to be a painter, so I can paint A Decent Burial. Can't you just see it? Alma-Tadema and Burne-Jones in the foreground, A-T standing, hat doffed, staring down sadly at their hole, B-J kneeling down with the tube of mummy in his hand, ready to inter it, a cluster of grave, watching pre-Raph women in the background, English garden all around. Perfect.
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WORKS CITED
Pringle, Heather. The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead. New York: Theia, 2001. pp. 203-204.
Found this anecdote in the other book I'm reading at the moment (The Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle). It isn't quite as good as Dante Gabriel Rosetti's wombat, but it is rather sweet (for funny values of sweet, I grant you, but still).
Up to and during the nineteenth century, there was a pigment called "mummy." V. popular, made a lovely clear glowing brown. Thing is, it was really made out of, well, mummies. No, really. Ground up mummies. ("Raise your hand if ewwwww," as Buffy says.) So, one day in 1881, Lawrence Alma-Tadema comes across his colorman at work, cheerfully grinding up Egyptian mummies for paint. Alma-Tadema hadn't known what "mummy" was made of, and moreover he'd made his name (according to H. Pringle, who isn't so hot on the accurate details, in case somebody knows better) by painting beautiful Egyptian scenes. Horrified and appalled, he rushes to tell his friend Edward Burne-Jones:
Burne-Jones, too, was stunned. After a moment's thought, he hurried off to his studio and returned with a tube of mummy in hand. He wanted to give it a decent burial. "So a hole was bored into the grass at our feet," noted Georgiana Burne-Jones later, "and we all watched it put safely in, and the spot was marked by one of the girls planting a daisy root above it."
Now I want to be a painter, so I can paint A Decent Burial. Can't you just see it? Alma-Tadema and Burne-Jones in the foreground, A-T standing, hat doffed, staring down sadly at their hole, B-J kneeling down with the tube of mummy in his hand, ready to inter it, a cluster of grave, watching pre-Raph women in the background, English garden all around. Perfect.
---
WORKS CITED
Pringle, Heather. The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead. New York: Theia, 2001. pp. 203-204.
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no subject
Date: 2003-02-03 06:01 am (UTC)Alma Tadema painted classical scenes generally, Egyptian girls dancing round obelisks, Romans in at art gallery, the Rape of the Sabines (for which he used his daughters as models) all very stiff and in very much sharper colours than one normally associates with the pre-Raphaelites.
I have this theory about the poor Egyptians, which is that some oracle once told them that after they died their bodies would be used for terrible things -- displayed to millions in museums, ground up for paint and for medicine. So they tried to make sure these things could never happen by using elaborate preservation techniques and hiding their tombs...
no subject
Date: 2003-02-03 06:27 am (UTC)... and it all so tragically backfired.
There was a book I must have checked out of the library, I don't know, a dozen times as a kid. By Avi, I think. It explained the whole process of mummification and the gods and the difference between the ka and the ba--absolutely terrific book and I wish I had a copy now. An astounding amount of what I learned from that book has stayed with me, and it's the reason that I have a tendency to go, "Ooh, hey! Canopic jars!" in Egyptian exhibits, much to my husband's amusement.
The Field Museum in Chicago has quite a nice display of an excavated tomb, complete with the anonymous mummy they found beneath the courtyard. (There's this little glass window in the floor, and you look down and there's the mummy looking back up at you. V. creepy.)
I love the Field Museum. I want to go back.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-03 09:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-03 09:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-03 09:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-04-11 06:26 am (UTC)Does she write about the mummy-unwrapping parties?
I can hardly bear to think of all the knowledge lost...
no subject
Date: 2003-04-11 10:54 am (UTC)She does write about mummy-unwrappings. As you say, appalling. (Here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/truepenny/30146.html), btw, is what I had to say about The Mummy Congress after I read it.)
no subject
Date: 2003-04-11 11:23 am (UTC)