Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

So, now that you know Rossetti’s Silence is on view for a limited time in the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court, let’s enhance your visit by getting to know the artist, his model, and the story behind this late Victorian masterpiece.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was born in London, where he attended Henry Sass’s Drawing Academy and the Antique School of the Royal Academy. Bored with the Academy’s traditional program, he joined the progressive studios of Ford Madox Brown and later William Holman Hunt. In September 1848 Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais challenged the Royal Academy’s hold on young artists by founding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters seeking to revive the simplicity and realism of early Italian Renaissance art. Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite pictures were criticized for their crude design, proof according to critics of the painter’s lack of technical training. Fearing future censure, Rossetti vowed to never exhibit publicly in London again, and by 1852 the original Brotherhood had ceased to exist.

In the 1860s, while painting his first pictures of single female figures, Rossetti fell under the spell of Titian, Palma Vecchio, and the great Venetian masters of voluptuous female flesh. His brushstrokes broadened, replacing what he had described as the “stipple in the flesh” of his earlier, painstakingly detailed Pre-Raphaelite compositions. His head-and-shoulders portraits in chalk like Silence sold well, and by 1870 he was devoting himself almost entirely to representations of the ideal woman, often in the form of Jane Morris. Rossetti’s later works were embraced by the Symbolist painters, who shared his interest in painting dreamy, introspective women lost in silent meditation and mystical inwardness.

Portraits of Jane Morris (1839-1914), by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and J. R. Parsons, From an album of photographs posed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1863. V&A 1738 & 1741-1939.

Jane Burden Morris (1839-1914), the face of Silence, inspired numerous works by Rossetti and his friends, among them the painter-poet William Morris whom she would marry in 1859. Jane was a remarkable beauty, destined to play a major role in Rossetti’s idealized and symbolic portraits of “stunners”—beautiful women shown at close range in often exotic settings.  In 1869, the American writer Henry James described her as having “a thin pale face, a pair of strange, sad, deep, dark Swinburnish eyes [a reference to the poems of the late Victorian writer Algernon Charles Swinburne], with great thick black oblique brows, joined in the middle and tucking themselves away under her hair.” Jane, the daughter of a humble stableman, was discovered by Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones in an Oxford theater. Thanks to her captivating looks, she was spared a life of poverty and a future in domestic service. Through Morris she was educated privately, mastering French and Italian as well as the piano.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882). Silence, 1870. Dry pigment (pastel or chalk) on two sheets of joined wove paper, 41 7/8 x 30 3/8 in. (106.4 x 77.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Luke Vincent Lockwood, 46.188

In Silence, Rossetti captures Jane’s beauty as well as her character; she was, according to contemporary accounts, an unusually silent woman.

Beginning today, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Silence, one of the Brooklyn Museum’s finest European works on paper, will be on view for the first time in nearly 40 years in the third-floor Beaux-Arts Court (the European paintings gallery).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882). Silence, 1870. Dry pigment (pastel or chalk) on two sheets of joined wove paper, 41 7/8 x 30 3/8 in. (106.4 x 77.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Luke Vincent Lockwood, 46.188

The Pre-Raphaelite painter-poet described Silence, a large scale drawing of a beautiful brunette deep in thought, in a letter to his model-and rumored mistress-Jane Morris: “Silence holds in one hand a branch of peach, the symbol used by the ancients; its fruit being held to resemble the human heart and its leaf the human tongue. With the other hand she draws together the veil enclosing the shrine in which she sits.”  In Victorian England, the abstract idea of silence was often linked to mysticism, Neoplatonic philosophy, and even death (Eternal Silence), themes that preoccupied Rossetti later in life, particularly after 1862 when his wife and principal model Elizabeth Siddal took her life with an overdose of laudanum.

In 1865 Rossetti commissioned a series of photographs of Jane Morris posing in the garden of his London home, Tudor House. Three years later, he began a series of formal drawings of her, often for future paintings. Silence, however, was executed in 1870 as a finished, independent work of art. In 1872 the drawing was sold behind Rossetti’s back while he was convalescing from a breakdown in Scotland. Four years later he bought back Silence and sold it for £210 (today $6,500). By 1946 it was with one Luke Vincent Lockwood, who presented it to the Brooklyn Museum, where it was last exhibited in 1971.

For the next six months, New Yorkers will have a rare opportunity to see a Rossetti masterpiece on paper, nestled in the Beaux-Arts Court’s north wall between paintings of equally reflective women-Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Siena-from Renaissance Europe and America. (In 1870 Rossetti was looking at Renaissance portraits of Venetian women for inspiration.)  Because of the sensitive nature of the drawing’s medium (dry, crumbly pastel or colored chalk) and support (two sheets of horizontally joined wove paper), Brooklyn’s Senior Paper Conservator Toni Owen has approved the presentation of Silence in the Court for no more than six months; it will be shown under significantly dimmer lights than those employed for paintings.

Today we are releasing apps for both iPhone and Droid that, simply, wrap our mobile website.  If we have a mobile website, you may be asking why we felt we needed to release apps that basically do the same thing.  The answer is both simple and complicated.

Let’s look at our overall strategy for a moment.  Given the museum’s community-minded mission, we aim to spend our time developing content in a sustainable and accessible manner.  This means closely adhering to web standards and writing code and designing interfaces that play nicely across all platforms.  So, the first iteration of our Mobile Web launch was simple—hit www.brooklynmuseum.org on a mobile device and get redirected to a version of the site that renders well on (many) small screens.  Rather than create an app, we followed our strategy and developed so we didn’t need one, but everything can change quickly when you put people in the mix…

In order to launch our mobile site, I hosted a mobile meetup at Target First Saturday.  The purpose of the meetup was to get visitors started using Gallery Tag! and gain some feedback on the new game, but I was stunned at what happened as I met with folks.  Nine times out of ten, the owners of the devices had confused looks when I said, “open your web browser and go to www.brooklynmuseum.org.” I was floored at how much confusion was created just simply getting people to open their mobile browser.  Once we’d get through that, the idea of bookmarking it to the home screen was even more foreign.  At almost every turn, visitors were expecting an app.  Seeing these exchanges, I started to think about accessibility again. Of course, there’s the nuts and bolts web accessibility approach that we’ve been very committed to, but there are also accessibility issues around natural usage behavior.  In this case, it was clear to me that people on app phones wanted apps, not necessarily mobile websites and by not giving them an app, we were actually making it more difficult for them to find our content.

And, here we are.  We hired Dave Wilkinson to build apps for iPhone and Droid.  If you don’t know Dave, we knew him from his work on the Indicommons app and, besides that, he’s Flickr famous.  The apps are designed to simply wrap our existing mobile web site, which makes the endeavor sustainable for us.  We can continue to add content to the mobile site, but the apps themselves can stay static and this means we can avoid future development costs.  While we are not expecting downloads by the gazillons, we are hoping that this makes our mobile content accessible via as many avenues as possible.

Once a papyrus sheet was formed it was joined together with other sheets to form long rolls. The papyrus roll format dates back to ~3,000 BCE and there is little evidence individual sheets were ever used alone. Smaller papyrus documents were either from halved or quartered rolls cut to certain lengths.

To make the roll, individual sheets were overlapped slightly; normally the sheet on the right overlapped the sheet on the left by 1-2 cm. The overlap was pasted, pressed and possibly burnished. Recent analysis has identified starch paste in the joins of several ancient papyri. Twenty sheets was the standard roll.

The completed roll or book was then rolled with the horizontal fibers on the inside and the vertical ones on the outside. If rolled in the opposite direction (vertical fibers inside) the fibers would have been crushed. The roll format explains why a laminate structure of perpendicular fibers was necessary. The rolls were stored either upright in vertical containers or in chests.

The height of the rolls varied in different periods. From ~2700-2200 BCE the maximum height was between ~8 and 9 ½”; while in the New Kingdom period ~1500-1100 BCE the average height was ~16″.

All types of recorded information were written on papyrus rolls or sections of a roll including legal, medical, administrative, mathematical and personal documents. In the 18^th dynasty (~1400 BCE) funerary texts began being copied onto papyri rolls and placed in wealthy burials; these became known as Books of the Dead.  These books usually read right to left and are unrolled from right to left.

The Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sebekmose a New Kingdom papyrus dating 1430-1400  measures 14″ in height and consists of 18 joined full sheets (each~16″ in width) and one partial sheet. The joins are easily identified in transmitted light as darker vertical lines due to the added opacity caused by the overlap.

One of the most unusual features of this Book of the Dead is that it is written on both sides of the papyrus. Normally scribes would avoid the vertical fiber side (verso) because it formed the outside of the roll and received the most wear, while the horizontal fiber side (called the recto) was better protected being on the inside.  As expected the spells and chants begin on the recto side. They are written in vertical columns in hieroglyphs and read correctly from right to left. The final spell, on the far left of the roll is completed just past the join of the 18th and 19^th sheet (the area represented by the black parallel lines in this image).

Note the last hieroglyph does not reach the bottom of the last column. The scribe has completed his work and does not need the extra 1 ½ sheets, thus explaining why there are 18 ½, rather than 20, sheets in this roll.

For whatever reason, and we are not sure why, after cutting off the rest of the roll the same scribe then flipped the roll horizontally and began writing on the verso in hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphs.

Note he begin the script just to the left of the last join which appears slightly lighter in color on the verso. The hieratic spells cover approximately 2/3 of the verso of the papyrus.

Treatment and analysis of this rare Book of the Dead is ongoing and as scientists, conservators, curators and modern papyrus makers continue their research the secrets of ancient Egyptian papyrus will also continue to unfold.

—-

This post is part of series by Conservators and Curators on papyrus and in particular the Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sebekmose, a 24 foot long papyrus in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. This unique papyrus currently in 8 large sections has never been exhibited due to condition. Thanks to a generous grant from the Leon Levy Foundation, the entire papyrus is now undergoing conservation treatment. The conservation work is expected to last until fall 2011 when all 8 sections will be exhibited together for the first time. Currently three conserved sections are on view in the Mummy Chamber in the Egyptian West Wing gallery. As each section is conserved, it will join those already on exhibition until eventually the public will see the Book of the Dead in its entirety.

Before we began treatment on the Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sobekmose papyrus scroll, the staff of the paper conservation lab decided to make our own papyrus sheets.  As with any conservation treatment that we do, it is important to have a good understanding of the materials and techniques that went into creating the original so that we are accurately equipped with the knowledge necessary to treat it. We tried to emulate the process used by the ancient Egyptians as closely as possible using the materials and tools available to us.  The first thing that is necessary to make a sheet of papyrus is a papyrus plant.

Papyrus is a perennial freshwater plant which favors marshes and swamps.  It grows best in shallow water along the edges of sheltered fresh water bodies, which is why the banks of the Nile are an ideal location for growing papyrus.  Fortunately, we are located next door to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where papyrus grows in the Aquatic House.  (more…)