1. Did you know that there was a vogue for heart-shaped books in the fifteenth century? I learned this fact last weekend, when I heard a wonderful talk by Niki Dinensis. Here’s a fun short piece on the heart-shaped book in fifteenth-century Europe (mostly northern Europe), and if you would like to make your own…
Five Fun Things: January 2023
I know – January is almost over. But better late than never, right? & 1 Cool Object An Embroidered Workbox from the V&A Museum. Hannah Downes made the needlework panels on this workbox around 1684. The panels are made of canvas, worked with silk thread, and it looks surprisingly modern due to Downes’s choice to…
Five Fun Things… & One Cool Object
Introducing a new monthly column, where we feature five fun things that caught our attention, and one cool object. Because sometimes you just need a list, yeah? No extra verbiage. 5 Fun Things 1 Cool Object A 1,300-year-old necklace from the Harpole Treasury, recently discovered in England. According to the Washington Post, “The jewelry piece,…
A Recipe for Gingerbread, courtesy of a 17th-century manuscript
Clara Peeters, A glass of red wine, a sprig of rosemary, and sweetmeats on a pewter platter (also known as Allegory of Marriage), c. 1607. Current whereabouts unknown. In early November, I participated in EMROC’s Transcribathon, and I ended up transcribing a seventeenth-century recipe for gingerbread. The recipe opened up a fascinating window into the…
In the generally-accepted opinion of experts
This month marks the five-year anniversary of Christie’s historic Salvator Mundi sale. A piece on authenticity warranties by Anny Shaw made me think more deeply about what the concept of “scholarly consensus” means in a scholarly or academic setting, and why the “generally-accepted opinion of experts” might take on a different resonance in a legal…
Your Kitchen is a Time Machine: An interview with Marissa Nicosia of Cooking in the Archives
By Cynthia Houng I’ve been following Marissa Nicosia and her food history/cooking blog, Cooking in the Archives, for a few years now. I was delighted when Marissa graciously consented to an interview with Ars Longa. Marissa is a true polymath: a scholar of Renaissance/Early Modern literature, food history, and political theory, a professor at Penn…
A Visit to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire
By Jamie Kwan As a scholar of the Early Modern, I have made my yearly pilgrimage to the annual Renaissance Society of America (RSA) conference. As many of you may know, it is an academic, interdisciplinary, three to four day event filled with panels, roundtables, and networking; it is a prime time to cross paths…
Ars Book Club, Summer 2022: Italian Journeys
Book Club is back! This time, we are following a slightly different format. Inspired by the Cookbook Groups hosted by Kitchen Arts & Letters, where each session revolves around an interesting theme (e.g., Flavors of New York, Off the Beaten Path, Food and Connection: Family and History), our Summer 2022 Book Club revolves around the…
Printmaking: An Excavation
Printmaking is both one of the simplest and most complicated artistic techniques. Many of our first art projects likely were prints, from rubber stamps to stone rubbings, while techniques like lithography use a complex series of chemicals to pull an image from a limestone base. And yet print’s simplest techniques, upon reflection, turn out to…
Old Masters Today #5
Idiosyncratic market highlights, irreverent collecting ideas, and important Old Masters news. It’s a new world since January 2021 when I debuted this column. We’re at least a handful of frat house names into COVID-19 variants and apparently the metaverse and NFTs are here to stay with museums such as the Uffizi to the Belvedere to the British Museum banking on this…
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