Hi! We love a niche topic, and this is proving to be a bit of a challenge…
Our best result is a journal article from 1995, “Miró’s Mystical Mollusks” by Corinne Mandel, viewable for those with JSTOR access. A preview of the text:
“Claudius Aelian considered the snail to be astute by dint of its ability to slither in and out of its shell, and in this way to evade birds bent on the kill. In the Old Testament, conversely, those creatures who slither on their stomachs, including the snail, were listed as forbidden foods. Such was not the case with the ancient Romans, whose gastronomic art led them to devise rather sophisticated methods of fattening land snails, one of their favored foods. Delightful though the snail may have been to the taste, it was thought to be altogether too paranoic on account of its insistence on carrying its house everywhere it went. The snail accordingly came to signify mistrust and deception” (pg. 117).
Probably not the precise thing you’re looking for, but interesting stuff nonetheless!
The Ainu people are an indigenous ethnic group residing in the northern parts of the Japanese archipelago, including what is today known as Hokkaido and the Tōhoku region of Honshu. Their ancestors date back to the Paleolithic (35,000 – 13,500 BCE) and Jomon periods (13,500 – 400 BCE).
This accordion style album is a copy of Ishūretsuzō (夷酋列像), also known as A Series of Paintings of Ainu Chieftains. It is a series of twelve painted portraits of Ainu elders who helped suppress the Menashi–Kunashiri rebellion in 1789 by siding with the Wajin (ethnic Japanese people, also called Yamato people). The original portraits were completed in 1790 by the Japanese artist Kakizaki Hakyō (1764–1826) and was received by the imperial court in Kyoto in 1791. The album includes a portrait of an elderly woman named Chikiriashikai, the mother of the chieftain Ikotoi, also pictured in the album.
Tan Yi-Ern Samuel, Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, is looking at this album for his paper in Professor Yukio Lippit’s seminar on East Asian Portraiture, taught with curator of Chinese painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joseph Scheier-Dolberg. Today, we opened the album to look at it in its standing accordion style. The clothing worn and other accoutrements including animal fur depicted in the portraits show the connections between the Ainu, the Wajin, China, and Russia during that time.
The Ainu people are one of the few ethnic minorities native to the Japanese islands. They have been subjected to forced assimilation and colonization by the Japanese since at least the 18th century or earlier. Their ancestors, referred to as Emishi, were pushed to the northern islands by Wajin since the 9th century. The portraits of Ainu elders in this album reveal how they might have been fashioned in the imagination of the Wajin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Sir Lady Java is a transgender rights activist, dancer, singer, comedian, and actress. When her performances were shut down by the LAPD in 1967 she organized picketing at clubs and fought in court with the support of @ACLU.
This manuscript is part of the José Agusto
Escoto collection of Cuban history and literature. The
1574 manuscript in a later binding had extensive beetle damage from its previous life in the Caribbean when it arrived at Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. There were
such copious frass deposits that large sections of the 119 pages were stuck
together, so much so that the text could not be read. Karen Walter, senior
paper conservation technician, had a lot of work ahead of her.
The manuscript needed to be stabilized for
digitization by disbinding, separating the fragile pages, re-attaching the
fragments with media, and rehousing in Mylar sleeves.
It was the “separating” part of this task that
worried Karen until, during disbinding, she realized that the frass was very
brittle. She did a test using a Teflon tool to apply pressure through the paper
on top of a small area of frass and was surprised when it crumbled away
allowing her to slide a microspatula further between the two pages until it hit
the next deposit. In the worst cases, this step was repeated dozens of times.
As a result, the pages were successfully
separated with minimal loss of media revealing text which had been inaccessible
for many years. And as a bonus, it turned out that crushing desiccated bug poop
for days was a lot of fun!
For Ask A Conservator Day, bringing back one of the more heroic efforts from Harvard Library’s amazing and highly skilled conservation team.
Newly digitized: a landmark in the history of science, Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger, reports his astronomical observations through the newly invented telescope, showing the mountains and craters of the Moon, and the satellites of Jupiter, for the very first time.
Unfinished business: this manuscript was intended to have illuminated initials, but for some reason they were never completed, which gives us an unusual opportunity to see an earlier stage in the process, preparatory sketches which would have eventually been covered over.
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313-1375. De mulieribus claris : manuscript, [ca. 1425]
“Story of a man with the hair of a woman” from Boaistuau, Pierre. Histoires prodigieuses : extraictes de plusieurs fameux autheurs, grecs et latins, sacrez et prophanes. Paris, 1568.
Page from an album of photographs of Herbert Charles Pollitt performing as Diane de Rougy at the Cambridge Footlights in the 1890s. Wikipedia notes “He became notorious as a Cambridge undergraduate due to his taste for Decadent art and literature, and was immortalised as the eponymous hero of an E.F. Benson novel (The Babe B.A.) in 1896. He became a very close friend of the artist Aubrey Beardsley, and had a brief but significant relationship with the occultist Aleister Crowley.”
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![houghtonlib:
“ The procession of the months: the verses by Beatrice Crane; the designs by Walter Crane, [1889].
Typ 8302.89.10
Houghton Library, Harvard University
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