Check out this fascinating list of the most famous unfinished works of art.
The Athenaeum
Gilbert Stuart is widely considered to be one of America’s foremost portraitists. His best known work, the unfinished portrait of George Washington that is sometimes referred to as The Athenaeum, was begun in 1796 and left incomplete at the time of Stuart’s death in 1828. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for over one century.
Cracked.com, purveyor of interesting and funny lists, has compiled one entitled “7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed the World“. What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on any one of them.
#2 Ab urbe condita libri, by Livy
It detailed the entire history of Rome from its Trojan forefathers to the reign of Caesar Augustus, 800 years later–which means it includes a shitload of information on the subject not written down anywhere else. This bastard weighed in at 142 freaking volumes and anyone who ever got their hands on any part of it agreed that it was absolutely astounding.
After the West fell to ruin, Livy’s beast became the single most sought-after book from antiquity, all without a single splash of gratuitous violence or naked women.
Imagine finding an ancient copy of “Egyptian architecture” to settle once and for all how they built pyramids. Not the “Time Life Books”-type? That’s cool, because you would have also been able to look up all the Gladiator records. All the mysteries of Ancient Rome would be at least kind of answered. Granted you’d probably never be able to read the whole book on your own; just owning one copy of this megalodon would pit every university on Earth in a bidding war to buy it from you.
But just the parts of Livy’s histories that survived helped Italy invent a little something called “the Renaissance,” and the books themselves were worshiped like goddamn monoliths.
Has the mysterious Voynich Manuscript been decoded? One independent researcher claims to have cracked the code: the words are anagrams of medieval Italian words.
When I examined the VM script, I noticed that there were very few corrections, and the writing, though slow, had the appearance of easy fluidity. A complicated code would require making a preliminary copy using for example a slate for a scratch pad. Paper was expensive in the 15th century. To produce a 200 page manuscript under these conditions would be a very tedious task. The encoding must have been simple, easy and direct. Gordon Rugg has suggested that the VM is nothing but a meaningless jumble of letters! I wondered whether he was not correct, with one modification, only the individual words were jumbled, i.e. anagrams.
It is an enduring mystery of English literature: What secrets lie entombed beneath the thick scribbles that Charles Dickens made as he wrote, and rewrote, the 66 pages of “A Christmas Carol” in 1843?
The manuscript of this classic holiday ghost story, written in six weeks to raise much-needed cash, is housed at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan, where it bears all of Dickens’s additions and subtractions in his own hand.
On page 3, he inserts “his eyes sparkled” to amplify the portrait of Scrooge’s nephew, whose beneficence is crucial to the plot.
On page 12, where Scrooge takes Marley’s ghost to be evidence not of the supernatural, but of his own indigestion, (“more of gravy than of grave,”) he converts the offending bit of food from being a “spot of mustard” to a less digestible “blot of mustard.”
A 12th-century missal, looted during WWII from a cathedral in Italy is set to be returned.
The Benevento Missal, which was stolen from a cathedral in southern Italy soon after the Allies bombed the city during the Second World War, has been in the collection of the British Library (formerly the British Museum Library) since 1947. After a change in the law, it could be back in Italy within months, according to The Art Newspaper.
The missal’s return could also focus attention on other, more high-profile cases, such as the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles and the Benin Bronzes from the British Museum to Athens and Nigeria.
However, the new law would not affect the legal status of such items because the new Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act applies only to claims dating from the Nazi era.
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This is a blog about history. It is edited by me, Sevaan Franks, and features news articles and links to interesting anthropology, archaeology, geology, paleontology and other general history-related items from around the world. If you have a story you would like to see featured on this site, please drop me a line.
