One of my personal favorite bits of touristing is doing the museum tour, and there’s plenty to choose from in Europe.  The grand cities have some of the greatest art musuems of the world, collecting over a millennium of masterpieces (mostly from Europe and North America, granted, but also some from further afield).  In our time here, Susan and I have been privileged to explore the Prado, Reina Sophia, Thyssen, Louvre, d’Orsay, National Gallery, and Victoria and Albert.  And that’s not counting other art museums that we’ve seen on other occasions or the vast amounts of art accumulated in palaces, cathedrals, churches, mansions, and random other tourist destinations.  It brings alive all those dusty memories of art movements that (for me) date back to high school, making them vivid and setting them in context.  Still, with all of this art trekking, we’ve noticed a few other features that aren’t mentioned quite so often.

For one, why is Jesus always pictured as having shoulder-length, wavy brown hair and a beard?

Jesus and his hairdo

For most of us, this is an image we’ve seen all our lives — so much so that we probably don’t even think about it.  There is always the observation that Jesus was, of course, almost certainly Semitic, rather than Caucasian (as he is usually pictured in Euro-derived art).  But I have never really heard anybody discuss this artistic convention about his hairdo.

I mean, really — where did this notion come from?  It’s everywhere — in art going back at least a thousand years, J.C. is drawn this way.  It’s there in medieval paintings, stained glass in cathedrals, Renaissance statues, and everything since, up to and including modern neon light displays.  You have to look hard to find a rendition of Jesus that doesn’t have those features.  But, as far as I know, we have no actual evidence or description of how he really looked.

So who came up with it?  Somebody had to have been first to draw him like that, and it has stuck ever since.  But who?  And why?  I suppose that it sticks because it has become a set of attributes that we use to identify J.C.  In the same way that the crescent moon and the third eye are attributes that identify Shiva to Hindus, Christians know to look for the coiffure.

Saint Sebastian (as rendered by Crivelli)

Another thing we’ve noticed is an overwhelming fascination with certain specific saints.  While the Catholic church acknowledges an incredible number of saints (over 10,000 according to the Wikipedia article), only like five or six ever show up in European art.  One of the favorites is Saint Sebastian.  The story is that this poor bastard managed to piss off Emperor Diocletian and got his ass filled with arrows for his trouble.  Miraculously, of course, he didn’t die, but lived on to work other miracles and harangue Diocletian some more.  (Not surprisingly, this did not sit well with Diocletian, who decided that he must not have done the job thoroughly the first time and had his soldiers drag Sebastian out, beat him to death, and toss his body into the outhouse.  Yum.)  Anyway, Sebastian is all over the place.  Everybody seems to love to paint him.  We’ve seen dozens of images of this poor fellow, all recognizable by the arrows.  (Sometimes only a couple, sometimes a porcupine’s complement.)  Usually, he has a far-away expression that is probably intended to represent his holy fixation on the heavens and his unconcern with paltry physical ephemera like being pincushioned with broadheads.  Unfortunately, too few artists can really capture “ethereal”, so it usually comes out feeling like a cross between marijuana mellow and constipated.

Salomé with the head of John the Baptist, as rendered by Caravaggio

You see a similar sort of ambiguous facial expression in the omnipresent images of Salomé.  So this chick either deliberately, or at her mother’s behest, requested John the Baptist’s head on a platter as a present.  Most teenage girls don’t get such extravagent gifts from their dads, but when your dad is the king, special rules apply.  (I would have gone for the red sports car myself, but hey — no accounting for tastes.)  So Herod’s soldiers dutifully brought her the head on a plate.  The funny thing

Titian's version of Salomé and John

is that she’s so often pictured almost completely impassively, or at most with a little distaste or perhaps some smugness.  But a surprisingly underwhelming reaction for someone who has just had a dish of gore dropped in her lap.  I guess I haven’t verified for myself, but I’m pretty sure that the Bible doesn’t say anything about her being clinically psychopathic or having dangerously flattened affect.  Or maybe that was just the kind of thing you got for your daughter in those days and she was used to it — had a dozen in her closet already.  I dunno.  shrug

Little old man baby Jesus

Ugly babies are another popular theme.  Specifically, ugly baby Jesuses.  We can’t quite figure out what’s going on, but our best guess is that it was way easier for Rennaisance painters to get adult female models than baby males.  (Or to get them to sit still or something.)  Or maybe it’s just that the painters are all struggling to make the little guy look simultaneously like a cute and helpless infant and the King of Kings with all the wisdom of the ages in his barely postnatal eyes.  For whatever reason, the galleries are littered with truly fugly baby Jesuses.  Warped little beasts that look sometimes more like a lizard and sometimes more like a goblin.  Sadly, I don’t have the absolute best example of this genre here.  They don’t allow photos in the National Gallery in London, but there’s an absolutely stunningly horrendous baby Jesus in their collection.  The kid is, I shit you not, gray.  And it’s not that the painting has aged — the other people in the painting are relatively normal flesh-toned.  In comparison, the little Lamb of God comes off as, well, a baby zombie.  “Awwww….  Kewt widdle baby zombie Jesus!  Smile for Mr. Painter man!”

Baby Jesus: lord of the pit fiends

Madonna with creepy child

With looks like these, the little guy would have had to have God looking out for him, to keep his parents from drowning him quietly in the night…

Greenwich is probably best known as the baseline for both the Prime Meridian and the Greenwich Mean Time: 0º longitude and 0:00 hours.

And, of course, the canonical things to do when you’re there are to stand on the zero line…

Susan half in one hemisphere and half in the other.

… and to set your watch by GMT:

The Royal Observatory clock. Note the prime meridian line running vertically through the clock.

Sadly, these days the public clock display is set from GPS time, rather than an on-site master atomic clock.  Oh well.

While it may not be entirely obvious, the fact that 0º and 0 hours are co-located is not at all a coincidence, nor is it just the whims of the British Empire in action.  The two are actually quite fundamentally linked, at the level of physics and math.  The small observatory museum had a fascinating discussion of the science and technology of location and horology.

The short-short story is that knowing your longitude can be reduced to knowing what time it is.  Or, more precisely, knowing what time it is where you are relative to what time it is where you started.  For example, if you can figure out that when it’s exactly noon to you, it’s 11:00 AM at your starting point, then you know that you’ve moved 1/24′th of the Earth’s circumference east.  (More precisely, you’ve moved 15 degrees east, which is 1/24th of the Earth’s circumference, or roughly 1670 km, only at the equator.  Close enough for this discussion, anyway.)  So knowing time gives you distance.  Therefore, it makes perfect sense to put your 0 time base on top of your 0 distance base.

Now, where you choose to put 0 longitude is a matter of convenience or, in practice, the might of the British Empire.  But having done that, your time base is naturally set.

This is a familiar story to anybody who has read a bit of the history of technology or exploration.  What I found really interesting was the museum’s history of horology, focusing on the Harrison chronometers of the Eighteenth Century.  These were the first timepieces with sufficient precision and robustness to be used in practice for navigation.  He built a series of chronometers in response to a contest to devise such a device, and the Royal Observatory Museum holds originals or replicas of the first four models, most in working condition.  (The fourth, “H4″, ultimately won the contest.)  They are fascinatingly intricate machines:

Harrison's first contest chronometer. State of the art for the day, but not quite good enough.

(Sadly, we weren’t allowed pictures in the museum itself, so this is a stock image grabbed from the ‘net.)

What really startled me, though, was the evolution of the chronometers.  The H1, above, is about 3 feet tall, made of delicately machined brass.  I have trouble guessing how heavy it is, but I’m sure that it would take a couple of people to move it around.  H2 and H3 were similarly intricate, delicate, and bulky.  But then, just a few years later, Harrison released the H4:

Harrison's H4, ultimate winner of the contest.

Looks like a pocket watch, doesn’t it?  In fact, it is the great grandfather of all pocket watches — within a few years, it had been duplicated, miniaturized and was being mass produced for individual use.  The H4 itself is too large to be a convenient pocket watch (you probably can’t tell without a scale, but it’s maybe 4 or 5 inches across), but compared to its predecessors it’s a model of compactness and elegance.  It was incredibly startling to see three massive beasts of chronometers lined up, followed by something that looked nearly petite in comparison.  It is both a reminder that recent memory is not the only era in human history when technology has advanced blazingly quickly and a vivid demonstration that getting the core design ideas right makes a huge difference in the final design.

The exterior of the British Museum

Unlike the castles, churches, and monuments, which have pretty scary admission fees, the British Museum is free and proud of it.  And it’s awfully nice that it is free, since we can drop in for an hour or two to see one exhibit if we have to be downtown.  It also turns out that there’s an amazing game store just down the street, where we picked up <i>Accused</i>, the game we mentioned in our Spiel game convention review back in the archives of this blog.

The courtyard was roofed over in the year 2000, I think.  The central column is now galleries, but once it held a British Library reading room where Marx studied.  I’ll have to double-check that, but I think that’s right.

The courtyard of the British Museum

The first time we visited was our first weekend here, and that was a mistake.  School was still out, tourists were still visiting, and the famous exhibits were MOBBED.  We waited about 20 minutes and couldn’t get close enough to see the Rosetta Stone.  So we went upstairs and looked at the galleries on currency and Japan instead, which was pretty amazing too.

We went back for a couple of hours this weekend, and we were able to see some of the famous exhibits.  The Rosetta Stone is pretty amazing.  It makes you want to try your hand on translation yourself, except for the part where I don’t know the Greek either.  The carved hieroglyphics are beautiful.

It was still pretty crowded at the stone.  What you don’t see in the picture are the four rows of gawkers who kindly stepped aside to let us take it.  It was

The Rosetta Stone

really a rude touristy thing to do, but I’m glad we did it anyway.

Then we walked through the gallery on Assyria and got a dose of cuneiform writing.

I was surprised to realize that they do allow pictures.  Most museums we’ve been to don’t, so I just assumed this one wouldn’t either.  So it’s a nice surprise that we can share a few.

Cuneiform writing from Assyria

A demonstration of Pacific Islander dance in the courtyard

You may only purchase half-day tickets to visit the Alhambra.  Ours were in the afternoon.  Tickets must be purchased in advance, and purchasing them was a bit of a drama in itself.  Problems with the website on the Mac, combined with a general fear of international credit cards, meant that it took us about four tries of the course of a week to actually purchase tickets.  We originally tried to get morning tickets because there are fewer sold.  In theory, we would have been able to see the sights with fewer other tourists around. However, it turned out that the crowds weren’t crushing in October, so we were just as happy to take an afternoon slot because it was about an hour longer.

The Alhambra, originally Qal’at al-Hambra or “The Red Fortress” was the seat of the Sultan when the Moors ruled Granada.  It’s a palace complex that dates from around 1300.  We’ve learned that it’s one of the biggest tourist attractions for Europeans in Europe.  And we certainly did meet people from all over the world there.

First, we visited the Generalife (pronunced hen-er-al-LEE-fay, yes we got it wrong too).  This was the garden retreat of the Nasrid princes and their harems, and thus the buildings are really just there to give one a place to sleep amongst the fountains, ponds, and greenery.

Part of the Generalife gardens

There are books of romantic lore from the Generalife about harem favorites meeting their lovers in secret in secluded parts of the gardens.

From there, we moved on to tour the actual complex of Nasrid palaces.  In addition to your visit being limited to morning or afternoon on a certain day, you had a special appointment time to see the palaces.  Ours was for 4:30.  Fortunately, they only tracked when you entered and didn’t particularly care when you left.

These are much smaller than the kind of homes you would expect for European nobility.  In fact, when Europeans moved into the area later, they built doors between the palaces to combine two or more into one larger palace. Even the Sultan’s audience room is a fraction of the size of what you’d expect from a king.  The Sultan sat between the two doors in the picture below on cushions for his audiences.

The Sultan's audience room

However, what they lack in space, the palaces make up in decoration.  Virtually every surface is covered in frescoes and carvings, most of which incorporate prayers in Arabic so artfully that we had trouble figuring out where the words ended and abstract decoration began.

A random arch in a Nasrid palace

The grounds of the palaces are also impressive.  There are many long, rectangular ponds that are intended to reflect the walls and gardens of the palaces around them.  The effect was supposed to be peaceful and give the illusion of more space.  Did it ever.

The Partal palace and its mirror pond

We were really amazed by the visit.  The extra hour from the afternoon visit was useful because we stayed until the sun set and had to find our way back to Granada proper in the dark.  We have about 200 other pictures that we hope to put up in a separate gallery if we get organized enough.

So we hit the Royal Palace on Saturday afternoon.

The Palacio Real Plaza

The Royal Palace was sort of like touring the White House — a lot of the rooms are still in use for state functions. Most of the decorating, though far more extreme than anything you’d find in the White House, dated from 1790 and later. But the highlight was the armory, which contained an absolutely amazing collection of armor and weaponry mostly dating from 1490-1590. A lot of it was mocked up on horse and human models so that you could better see how it was used. Most of it was ceremonial or jousting armor, since I don’t think there was much warfare going on with that sort of stuff in the 16th century.

View from above the armory

A second highlight for me was in the Queen’s collection, where they have on display the only surviving matched Stradivarius string quartet in the world.  I saw my first Strad viola!  Be still my beating heart.  We asked a roving tour guide if they ever get played, and she said they have a concert at least once a year.  Sigh.

And of course, they wouldn’t let me take any pictures :-p.

EDIT: So, our friend Tanner was able to get pictures of the Strads when HE was there.  I’m posting HIS.  Notice how intricately they’re decorated.  I’ve never seen that that either.

Stradivarius cello

Stradivarious violin

Sunday was the Thyssen art museum, which was the most fun I’ve ever had in an art museum except that they’d closed an entire wing of modern artists for renovation that I’d been looking forward to seeing all day. So, no Dali and Surrealists for me. Why is it that art museums are so rude about stuff like that? Terran relates that he hit an art museum in France while on vacation where the entire collection he’d gone there to see was traveling. It seems like common courtesy to post something when you enter the museum, “We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but Blah wing, containing artists Foo, Bar, and the entire Stupidist Movement is currently closed for renovation.” That way, if you were coming to the museum primarily to see this stuff, you know before you buy a ticket. And at the very least, you’re spared the disappointment when you go to see it.
[Stupidism, btw, is Studentbane's term for Dadaists and Postmodernists pushed the boundaries of "What is art" so far that they ended up hanging toilets on the wall or painting entire canvasses one color and calling it art. He's building a whole Monty Python-style routine: "Here you see a prime example of the Stupidist Movement. The can of Campbell's soup signifies the painters lust for food...." This will make you fall on the floor laughing after four hours looking at paintings.]

At any rate, the Thyssen museum is a formerly private art collection assembled by some powerful family (duh, the Thyssens) over a couple of hundred years. The museum is arranged to take you through the art movements approximately chronologically. A lot of the art by well-known modern artists like the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Cubists, etc. are stuff that hasn’t been snatched up by museums before now. So most art by household-name artists were the kind that was NOT representative of their famous works. A half-dozen Pissaro, none of which were Pointilist. Landscapes by Renoir. Almost a room filled with beautiful Impressionist paintings by Gauguin (Gauguin visited Haiti at some point in his career and devoted the rest of his life to painting misshapen Haitians — until seeing this stuff, I thought I hated everything he’d ever done).

Next weekend, we really will go to Segovia, barring any more mishaps with the train.