Humanities blog

In what was once the housekeeper’s office of a Tudor mansion in Hampshire, a very odd golden ring glitters on a revolving stand in a tall perspex column. In chapter five of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins finds a ring in the gloom of Gollum’s cave. Not just any ring. “One very beautiful thing, very beautiful, very wonderful. He had a ring, a golden ring, a precious ring.”

A new exhibition opening today at The Vyne, now owned by the National Trust, raises the intriguing possibility that the Roman ring in the case, and the ring of power in JRR Tolkien’s book The Hobbit, and in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, are one and the same.

As Dave Green, the property manager, explains, there’s more to the story than the ring – an iron-age site with ancient mine workings known as “the Dwarf’s Hill”, a curse on the thief who stole the ring, and a strong link to Tolkien himself.

Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford before he found fame as an author, with the publication of The Hobbit in 1937, and the first of the Rings trilogy in 1954. He certainly knew the story of the curse and the ring, and was researching the subject two years before he began work on The Hobbit.

The ring was in the collection of the Chute family – which for generations was interested in politics, collecting, and antiquarian research – for centuries before the house came to the National Trust in the 1930s.

“I was looking for the ring to show a visitor, and I walked right past the case with it – that’s when I decided we really had to make more of this amazing thing,” Green said. As well as the exhibition room, created with the help of the Tolkien Trust, the house now has a dwarf trail for children and a new playground with circular tunnels and green hillocks recalling Bilbo’s home, Bag End.

Continue reading in TheGuardian

Santa Rufina, Diego Velázquez

Por Borja Casans Castillejo, antiguo alumno del MBA Part-Time de IE Business School y Presidente del IE Art Club

La expresión de las artes del XVII recae en la necesidad de decorar los palacios Españoles. La Torre de la Parada, el Alcázar o El Escorial, todos ellos deben albergar cientos de piezas, conforme a la tendencia ya creada desde la época de Felipe II, que siempre buscaba los mejores flamencos primitivos. En el XVII el interés principal se encuentra en el mercado napolitano y el flamenco, los centros de creación más importantes. Existe también un mercado holandés pero al estar en guerra con nosotros, las autoridades gravaban su importación con un impuesto extra y por eso no se trae a España.

Por lo general, las compras se realizan a través de agentes, marchantes y por supuesto almonedas, algo muy común en las grandes colecciones. Todos los cargos en el extranjero, es decir los que tuvieran cargos diplomáticos, como gobernadores en los Países Bajos, virreyes en Nápoles, embajadores en Roma, estaban pendientes de comprar obras para enviar a la corte y también para iniciar sus propias colecciones. Digamos que es una fiebre en la demanda de arte.

Los grandes coleccionistas buscan adquirir piezas determinadas, por supuesto, pero también son los propios orígenes de los artistas los que determinan las compras. Ya que los pintores españoles se basaban en cuestiones religiosas, los napolitanos comprendían el desnudo y los flamencos el paisaje. Luego existe una influencia cruzada, Ribera con Italia, Carreño con Flandes etc. Un caso concreto sería toda la influencia artística que generaría Caravaggio muy apoyado para esta expansión por nuestro duque de Osuna.

Hay grandes oportunidades de compra en las almonedas, la más famosa es sin duda la de Carlos I de Inglaterra organizada por Cromwell para deshacerse de la ostentación de la monarquía. Desde España aprovecharíamos esta gran oportunidad, enviando agentes para elegir las piezas y así aumentar la colección de El Escorial. Y es que existe un deseo por parte del Rey de adquirir las mejores piezas, lo que lleva a enviar a estos agentes desde Madrid a todos los lugares. Un ejemplo serían los viajes del propio Velázquez, encargado de ir a Nápoles, Roma, Venecia, Florencia.

En Nápoles tenemos grandes coleccionistas como el Marqués de Carpio o Medina de las Torres o Medinaceli, y en Roma a otro como Monterrey. Casi todos tienen sus propios pintores-asesores, muy especialmente la corte napolitana donde existe la figura de “pintor del virrey”, aunque en Roma siendo muy escaparate social se encontraba casi al mismo nivel.

En los Países Bajos, se realizan encargos directamente a pintores como Rubens, Van Dyck o Sneyders. En estos casos es el propio cardenal Infante, gobernador en Flandes, quien se encarga de la supervisión y el control de las piezas que, a su vez, se enviarían a Madrid. Aparte de Felipe IV como gran amante de la pintura de Rubens, tenemos al marqués de Leganés.

Ambos mercados consiguen generar un deseo de posesión, lo que da la oportunidad a los marchantes a crear galerías-anticuarios entre los Países Bajos e Italia, con nuestras plazas de Madrid o Sevilla, desarrollándose la venta al por mayor. Esta actividad supone una transformación muy diferente al encargo, forma habitual de adquirir ante hasta ese momento.

British researchers on Saturday unveiled a new theory for the origins of stonehenge, saying the ancient stone circle was originally a graveyard and venue for mass celebrations.

The findings would overturn the long-held belief that stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in southwestern England was created as a Stone Age astronomical calendar or observatory.

A team led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of University College London said stonehenge, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is both older and had a different function than previously thought.

“In many ways our findings are rewriting the established story of stonehenge,” Parker Pearson said.

The archaeologists carried out a decade of research which included excavations, laboratory work and the analysis of 63 sets of ancient human remains.

They said the original stonehenge appeared to have been a graveyard for elite families built around 3000 BC, 500 years earlier than the site that is famous today.

The remains of many cremated bodies were marked by the bluestones of stonehenge, Pearson said.

Further analysis of cattle teeth from 80,000 animal bones excavated from the site also suggest that around 2500 BC, stonehenge was the site of vast communal feasts.

These would have been attended by up to one tenth of the British population at one time in what Parker Pearson said resembled “Glastonbury festival and a motorway building scheme at the same time.”

It seemed that ancient people travelled to celebrate the winter and summer solstices but also to build the monument, he said.

“stonehenge was a monument that brought ancient Britain together,” he said.

“What we’ve found is that people came with their animals to feast at stonehenge from all corners of Britain — as far afield as Scotland.”

He said it appeared to be the “only time in prehistory that the people of Britain were unified.”

Continue reading in artdaily

Spain’s great diversity is the big idea that runs through the Prado’s latest exhibition, El trazo español en el British Museum. Dibujos del Renacimiento a Goya (or, Spanish drawings from the British Museum: Renaissance to Goya). Featuring gems by artists from across the country, including Alonso Berruguete, Vicente Carducho, Murillo, Alonso Cano, Ribera and Goya, the show comprises a selection of 71 treasures from the London museum’s collection of Spanish illustrations, which have been allowed beyond the institution’s walls for the first time.

“The drawings in this exhibition are the proof that Spain has always been a Spain of regions and that one cannot understand the history of the country without its strong connections to the rest of Europe,” noted British Museum director Neil MacGregor after the presentation for the show on Tuesday.

Dividing into five sections, the exhibition begins with the arrival of graphic art practices in Castile between 1550 and 1560, when the styles and techniques of Italian masters were influencing the Spanish artists surrounding Philip II and his massive project to build El Escorial monastery, outside Madrid.

This influence continued to be felt in Madrid throughout the 17th century in the works of the Rizi brothers, Carducho and Carreño de Miranda. But at the start of the 18th century, it would give way to the impact of the Bourbons and Enlightenment promises wafting in from France.

Between one section and the next are examples of Andalusian and Valencian drawing. While warm tones and red chalk took precedence on the shores of the Turia river in Valencia between 1500 and 1700, in Seville, Granada and Córdoba demand from collectors led Murillo and Francisco de Herrera to found their school for drawing in 1660. This section includes one of the most prominent treasures in the collection: a drawing of the head of a monk attributed to Francisco de Zurbarán. Its value, however, remains uncertain as there is no record of any drawing bearing Zurbarán’s prized signature.

There are also two free spirits among the artists represented in the British Museum’s legendary Print Room: Ribera, with his male figures in a perpetual state of martyrdom, and Goya, in whose work the oppressed, the mad and the brutality of the Inquisition rub shoulders with a study of the first Duke of Wellington that closes the exhibition.

Continue reading in ElPaís