A Pennsylvania museum has solved the mystery of a Renaissance portrait in an investigation that spans hundreds of years, layers of paint and the murdered daughter of an Italian duke.
Among the works featured in the Carnegie Museum’s exhibit Faked, Forgotten, Found is a portrait of Isabella de’Medici, the spirited favorite daughter of Cosimo de’Medici, the first Grand Duke of Florence, whose face hadn’t seen the light of day in almost 200 years.
Isabella Medici’s strong nose, steely stare and high forehead plucked of hair, as was the fashion in 1570, was hidden beneath layers of paint applied by a Victorian artist to render the work more saleable to a 19th century buyer.
The result was a pretty, bland face with rosy cheeks and gently smiling lips that Louise Lippincott, curator of fine arts at the museum, thought was a possible fake.
Before deciding to deaccession the work, Lippincott brought the painting, which was purportedly of Eleanor of Toledo, a famed beauty and the mother of Isabella de’Medici, to the Pittsburgh museum’s conservator Ellen Baxter to confirm her suspicions.
Baxter was immediately intrigued. The woman’s clothing was spot-on, with its high lace collar and richly patterned bodice, but her face was all wrong, ‘like a Victorian cookie tin box lid,’ Baxter told Carnegie Magazine.
After finding the stamp of Francis Needham on the back of the work, Baxter did some research and found that Needham worked in National Portrait Gallery in London in the mid-1800s transferring paintings from wood panels to canvas mounts.
Paintings on canvas usually have large cracks, but the ones on the Eleanor of Toledo portrait were much smaller than would be expected.
Baxter devised a theory that the work had been transferred from a wood panel onto canvas and then repainted so that the woman’s face was more pleasing to the Victorian art-buyer, some 300 years after it had been painted.
Christ men have been Photoshopping women to make us more “pleasing” since for-fucking-ever.
Also, Isabella de’Medici is nice looking, but also has that look in her eye of all Medicis: “I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to kick your ass, buy you and everything you own, or have sex with you. Perhaps all three.”
It’s interesting the way the repaint has photoshop!Isabella affecting a slightly dreamy, docile gaze into the middle distance; she’s dewy-faced and unthreateningly soft. But in the original, she’s looking you right in the eye. She takes the male gaze and throws it right back at you. That’s a face that says go on, tell me I’d be so pretty if only I had a little repaint, I dare you. I’ll fuck you up.
They also made her hand smaller and I can’t tell if that’s an urn or scepter in her hand but considering it was painted out I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a symbol of power.
Oh, it’s a symbol of power alright. She’s a Medici, daughter of Cosimo I de Medici, First Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Medicis were the most powerful political family in Florence for almost forever. In Florence, the lines between politics, crime, warfare, and the Church were very blurry. They even managed, on four separate occasions, to get one of their own family members elected Pope, usually by very underhanded dealing with the cardinals. They had their fingers in every pie in Italy from 13th through 17th century.
In the case of Isabella, in order to secure an alliance with the Orsini family of Rome, she was married to Paolo Giordano I Orsini when she was 16. Contrary to popular belief, people in Renaissance Europe weren’t all that into child brides, this was just about the politics, so she stayed at her father’s household in Florence until she was of appropriate age. And then she just sort of… never left. Her new husband had zero concept of money, and her dad actually kinda hated him even though he was the one who arranged the marriage in the first place. So Isabella and her 50,000 scudi dowry (at a time when the average Italian earned somewhere between 10 and 40 scudi a year)stayed in Florence. Because she never went to Rome to live with her husband, she enjoyed enormous freedom and power back in Florence. After her mother died, she basically stepped into the role of First Lady of Florence, and was considered one of the keenest political minds in Europe. She ruled what she wanted, bought what she wanted, and fucked who she wanted, with no one really able to tell her no.
She was eventually assassinated by her husband while she was on holiday at one of her family’s country villas, probably because she was fucking her husband’s cousin, Troilo Orsini. Well, she had an “accident” while bathing, and Paolo Orsini said she must have drowned, but the coroner said she was strangled, and several servants swore they saw him do it. He might also have done it on the orders of Isabella’s brother, Francesco Medici, since he was trying to consolidate his power as the next Grand Duke, and by all accounts she was definitely in his way because of her political savvy.
So yeah. She was a boss, and that’s what makes it even more offensive that this Victorian sap tried to make her into this passive, skinny, doe-eyed wimp.
She also has probably the most natural and healthy body shape out of all
Disney girls, she has rolls on her belly for heavens sake!!! Healthy
body representation!!
nobody looks at you in california. you could be bouncing around nude on a pogo stick and people will be like “continue on your journey namaste.” you wear like a weird pair of shoes in boston and you will be fed to the dropkick murphys
if y’all don’t know, this is from chris fleming’s video “am i a man?” which is hilarious and you should watch it
White Diamond was formed in a star. That’s why she’s not like the other gems or even the other Diamonds. They were all made on terrestrial planets but White was forged in a star, maybe Homeworld’s. That would also explain why she’s glowing like crazy, she’s literally stellar.
Edit: Further evidence, her cape looks like it has stars in it, with her representing the “brightest star” of them all. Second piece is the way her outfit is designed, on the center of her chest it looks like a star design.
Another edit: Heck, her head is literally a five pointed star
Edit 2.0: Five pointed stars represent “authority” and “excellence”
EVEN MORE EVIDENCE: “ Sophdet, the Egyptian personification of the star Sirius, is always shown with the five-pointed star hieroglyph on her head.
“
Edit AGAIN: the symbolism of glow, is “enlightenment and understanding”, White seems to have known about Steven arriving, him being Pink Diamond, and potentially that Pink faked her shattering
Wow more edits:
“
the stars’ association with the heavens has turned them into symbols of the warfare between light, or spirit, and darkness, or material forces.” *cough black lipstick and nail polish and eyeliner but white body but black cloak again” (with a stretch this could explain why she seems a bittt unhinged)
Edit 3.5: This is why White seems star based, calling Steven “starlight” and saying “thank the stars” (stretch)
Edit 3.6: White’s ship is seemingly separated from everything else, kinda symbolizing her being at the center of everything. Like she’s the grandest of them all, also she really stole the spotlight of the episode. Just like a true star.
@atsuyuri-sama Has their own interesting theory where all the Diamonds were made from stars and if I may add to that. That would explain why White Diamond was called “difficult” because white dwarf stars are pretty dense, they are also incredibly long lived and will live longer than the current age of our Universe and that would add to the theory that White Diamond is the oldest Diamond!
@folkkvangr also made an awesome addition to @atsuyuri-sama ‘s post in which they said “At a distance of just nine hundred light-years, however, even a dim white dwarf should have been visible. The fact that they still can’t see it suggests to Kaplan that it must be unusually cool—no more than two thousand degrees, as opposed to about six thousand for the sun. “Most white dwarfs are made mostly of carbon and oxygen,” he said, and, at that temperature, given the density of a white dwarf, those elements should have crystallized. Another name for crystallized carbon is “diamond.”
“. Oh my stars, Rebecca please let our new crackpot theories be right.
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
Ain’t it amazing what white people consider history and what they don’t?
I always said disservice is done to oral traditions and myth when you take them literally. Ancient people were not stupid.
it’s rly sweet ppl think I live anywhere near a target like,
i can walk into some of the shops in my town barefoot carrying my dog and nobody will tell me to leave.
target isn’t brave enough to build here.
The last bastion of hope.
yeah also it’s not illegal to ride a horse to a bar and get wrecked in lieu of a designated driver so like. we have a lot going on here.
Let’s be real though, the horse will always head back to its barn, so really this is a great idea. Get smashed, tie yourself to the horse, let the horse do whatever, and you’ll end up at home.
…..not that I’ve ever done that on a trail ride before.
Okay, so a trail horse is reliable here, because a horse that’s afraid of city noises will head for home and avoid anything “dangerous” because it’s afraid.
However, in my experience city-trained horses are much more obedient and are unafraid of roads and trust their rider a lot more fully.
So if your drunk ass says “yeah let’s steer into oncoming traffic”
the horse is gonna say “seems weird but okay man.”
Okay this is 100% a legitimate point.
The only horse you should trust as DD is a horse with a healthy fear of speeding traffic.
I would hope that that’s all horses
It is possible and common to train the good sense right out of a city horse.
Very very true.
A city horse would walk facefirst into an oncoming train if you asked it to.
This is why I prefer country horses with a degree of realization of its own mortality left to it.
What the hell kinda city has a horse
…I just love the fact that there is a distinction between country horse and city horse.
What is a city horse, what IS it
left ma and pop’s farm to make it big out there…..that horse’s gonna be a star
