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The John Rylands Library’s recently rediscovered Spencer Album 8050 contains a proof state of the Battle of the Romans and the Sabines, an engraving pivotal in the short-lived but ambitious collaboration between Jacopo Caraglio (1500–65) and Rosso Fiorentino (1495–1540) in Rome. This proof impression was first printed in black ink, and then densely covered with hand-drawn ink. A comparison between the new proof state and previously identified states of the engraving using a novel technical approach involving long-wave infrared light to isolate the printed lines optically indicates that the Spencer proof state precedes any other known state of the engraving. The use of penwork and printing on this early proof and subsequent proof states demonstrates how Caraglio and Rosso saw drawing and printing as intimately connected, iterative steps in the print’s production.
In 1869, Parliament disestablished the Church of Ireland, dissolving what Benjamin Disraeli called the ‘sacred union’ of church and state in Ireland. Disestablishment involved fundamental issues – the identity and purpose of the established church, the religious nature of the state, the morality of state appropriation of church property for secular uses, and the union of Ireland and Britain – and debate was carried on at a high intellectual level. With disestablishment, the Church of Ireland lost much of its property, but it recovered, now as an independent Episcopal church with a renewed mission. The idea of the United Kingdom as a semi-confessional Protestant state, however, was dealt a serious blow.
The Morbetto, or Plague in Crete, designed by Raphael and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, juxtaposes the pestilence described in Virgils Aeneid with the ruinous state of Romes ancient remains in the Renaissance. This article examines this exceptional collaboration between the artist and engraver in light of early modern medical knowledge of contagion and an emerging discourse on the preservation of Roman ruins. It argues that the tonal properties of engraving and reproducible nature of print are integral to the meaning of the Morbetto, an image in which new artistic creation arises from a cultural landscape dominated by the fragmentary heritage of the past.
A skeletal collection from 105 burials excavated at the Old Kingdom and Ptolemaic Period cemetery in Saqqara, Egypt, was investigated for evidence of ante-mortem fractures of long bones. The collection comprised 57 males, 30 females, 14 unsexed sub-adults, and 4 unsexed mature individuals. The majority of the skeletons were complete or almost complete, despite the disturbance caused by tomb looters in antiquity. Fractures were recorded by bone, side, location, type and state of healing. The prevalence of fractures was calculated in male and female populations, as well as in individual age groups. The state of healing of the fractures was examined in order to investigate the possibility of medical treatment provided. No evidence of fractures was recorded in subadults. Evidence of single fractures were found in fourteen adults, and a further five individuals sustained two fractures to different bones of the upper limb. The frequency of fractures by bone count was the highest among the Middle and Old Adults. Fractures to the radius (37.5%) and the ulna (33.3%) were the most common, while no fractures were recorded in the tibia. Angulation, rotation and shortening were observed among the healed bones.
This essay focuses upon the controversy surrounding Lord George Townshends appointment as Irish viceroy in 1767. He was the first viceroy to be made constantly resident and therefore it was a shift that could be seen as part of a process of imperial centralization, akin to assertive British policy-making for the American colonies and India. Up until this point there has been some doubt as to whether Townshend himself or the British Government was the prime mover behind this key decision. This article uses the Caldwell-Shelburne correspondence in the John Rylands Library,to shed further light on this policy-making process, as well as commenting on the importance of Sir James Caldwell, landowner, hack writer and place-hunter extraordinaire, and the Earl of Shelburne, Irish-born Secretary of State and later Prime Minister, and reflecting on the historiography,of the Townshend administration and Anglo-Irish relations more generally.
A quest for information concerning one of the missing room interiors of Wray Castle, a Gothic villa near Windermere in Cumbria, built for a Liverpool surgeon in the 1840s, curiously led the National Trust to the wonderfully contrasting neo-classical Manchester Central Library, designed by E. Vincent Harris and completed in 1934. A trawl through the records revealed a keen donor but a reluctant architect. Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century carved oak panels from the library of Wray Castle were removed and donated for use in the new Central Library by the Lord Mayor of Manchester, Sir Robert Noton Barclay, before he gave the castle to the National Trust. Archive material held at Manchester shows that Harris was reluctant to accept the panels, stating his reasons firmly, but that he was prevailed upon to do so and finally incorporated them some years later.
The history of the Allan Library is here told systematically for the first time. This antiquarian collection of substantially foreign-language books and some manuscripts was formed by barrister Thomas Robinson Allan (1799-1886) during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. His stated intention was to create a Methodist rival to Sion College Library (Church of England) and Dr Williamss Library (Old Dissent). Allan donated it to the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in 1884, which funded the erection of purpose-built Allan Library premises opening in London in 1891. However, the Wesleyans struggled to make a success of the enterprise as a subscription library, and the collection was in storage between 1899 and 1920, before being sold by Conference to the London Library (where most of it still remains). The Allan Library Trust was established with the proceeds of the sale. The reasons for the relative failure of Allans great library project are fully explored.