Stirling Castle carvings finished


The Stirling Heads in place with some of the palace painters. Image from the Stirling Castle blog.

I’ve been linking to stories about the restoration of Stirling Castle’s Royal Palace to its 16th century appearance, including the recreation of the Stirling Heads for several years (see here, here and here), and I’m pleased to now link to several stories about the completion of the project!

Renaissance heads of Caesar and Henry VIII to return to Stirling Castle Royal Palace of James V – Culture 24

Kings and queens and classical heroes return to Stirling Castle – The Scotsman

Meticulous work comes to a head – The Edinburgh Evening News

Castle masterpiece work unveiled – The Galloway Gazette

Sunday Short Takes

* Details of Peterborough Cathedral’s 2011 Katherine of Aragon Festival have been posted at their website. Here’s littlemisssunnydale’s video from the 2010 candlelight procession that I linked to last year.

* Renaissance Fashion: The Birth of Power Dressing is the cover article from the January 2011 issue of History Today and is available to read on their website.

* I totally forgot to post about this ahead of time, but BBC America is starting to show “The Tudors”, so those who haven’t had a chance to see it on Showtime or DVD can catch it there. And I’ve heard that UK viewers will finally see Season 4 starting later this month!

Anne Boleyn portrait needs conservation work

I know most of you have probably already seen this through other sites since I’m a little late posting it. (It’s been a rough week packing up my office and lab at work to move before some renovations… the upshot is that I’ll finally get a window office!)

From the National Portrait Gallery:

This important portrait of Anne Boleyn is in urgent need of conservation treatment. It is in a particularly vulnerable and unstable condition as a result of structural problems with the wooden panel. Vertical cracking has occurred across the picture causing minor paint loss where the wood has split (see the photograph taken in raking light alongside). We need to act now as the damage is being caused by the long term effects of an unsuitable cradle (an applied wooden panel support) which must be removed. Therefore this important and much loved painting needs urgent conservation treatment to ensure it can be put back on public display.

The Gallery hopes to raise

Blog maintenance today

Just wanted to give everyone a warning that I’m going to be doing some work on this blog today to try to fix some problems “under the hood”. If all goes well, it will be back up in under an hour and everything will be fine, although it will probably look different since I’m going to use that as a chance to upgrade to a more modern theme that will be easier for me to add new features to.

Catch you on the flip side!

Picture of the Week #104

Former place of the Shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Photo May 2003.

This was another one of those times that I had the perfect photo for the day a “Picture of the Week” fell on. The martyrdom of Becket occurred 840 years ago today in 1170 and the Tudor connection is that the shrine was destroyed in 1538 under orders of Henry VIII.

Sunday Short Takes – Monday edition

Yeah, I was goofing off and watching DVDs that I received for Christmas and totally forgot to do yesterday’s blog post. 🙂

* A newly built Elizabethan house – an update on a story I first posted about back in November 2007

* The secrets of Parliament’s Victoria Tower uncovered – neat video from the BBC

* The BBC Tudors Collection coming in April – A box set of Shadow of the Tower, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, The Other Boleyn Girl, and Elizabeth R US Amazon pre-order link below for anyone who is interested:

Tudor Cooking and Escape from the Tower of London

I’m way late in posting these cooking videos, but I wanted to be sure to get them up before Christmas for the two or three of you who haven’t already seen them. I’m going to just post the links to the YouTube versions because I recommend watching them at a higher resolution if you have the bandwidth!

From The Historic Royal Palaces Official YouTube page:

* Ryschewys close and fryez: Tudor cook-along video

* Fylettys en Galentyne: Tudor cook-along video

* Tartes owt of Lente: Tudor cook-along video

And if you have an iPhone and happen to be visiting the Tower of London, you can play “Escape from the Tower of London”, which looks like it could be a lot of fun.

Picture of the Week #102

Arms of Catherine of Aragon at Carew Castle in Wales. Photo May 2003.

This is a close-up of Catherine’s arms that are visible in the wider shot that I had way back as Picture of the Week #8. Her arms are a combination of those of Aragon (upper right and lower left) and Castile (upper left and lower right), as seen below (image adapted from a file at Wikimedia Commons):

France’s Henri IV’s head identified

A lot of you know that I get a big kick out of being able to link to articles on Scientific American here at a history blog. 🙂

From SciAm:

The severed head of King Henri IV has been identified from the jumbled remains in the mass graves in Paris’s Royal Basilica of Saint-Denis. A team of researchers used a host of scientific strategies to confirm the head’s owner, who was killed in 1610.
…
Henri IV was embalmed and then interred at the Basilica of Saint-Denis. But his – along with other royal graves there – was destroyed during the 1793 revolution. The remains were mutilated and mixed together in mass graves.
…
[…] although there were traces of hair left on the head and face, the researchers lacked adequate mDNA material to run a genetic test. So they turned to other methods to confirm the regal provenance of the cranium, including the following:

* Radiocarbon dating provided a 200-year window (1450 to 1650), which matched with Henri’s lifespan (1553 to 1610).

* Computed tomography (CT) scans of the head matched up nicely with details in a mould that was made just after the king’s death (now at the Saint-Genevieve Library in Paris).

* Raman spectroscopy showed traces of an amorphous carbon known as ivory black, which was used by the physician Pierre Pigray during the embalming process (specifically requested by the king to be “in the style of the Italians” rather than conforming to more typical French burial preparations). “This charcoal, obtained by anaerobic calcinations of animal bones, corresponds to that deposited by the surgeon Pigray on the surface of the cadaver to absorb decomposition fluids and putrefactive gases,” the researchers noted.

Full article

For context, Henri IV was King of France from 1589-1610 and King of Navarre from 1572-1610, contemporaneous with the last part of Elizabeth I’s reign.

You can see the research article at the British Journal of Medicine here, including imagery of the head.

Picture of the Week #100

Carvings under the Anne Boleyn Gatehouse at Hampton Court Palace. Photo June 2000.

Wow, I’ve hit 100 Pictures of the Week!

If I remember correctly, these carvings are Victorian. The figures are an entwined “H&A” and “A&H”, the portcullis (a Beaufort symbol), Anne Boleyn’s falcon badge, the fleur-de-lis and in the center, an intricate Tudor rose.