Thursday, August 19, 2021

A Cosmic Web Connects Everything in the Universe
Aug 18, 2021
Motherboard

From the surface of Earth it seems the stars and galaxies are randomly placed throughout the universe. But step back to a galactic scale, and a mysterious network of roads and hubs emerges. This is the Cosmic Web, and we are just beginning to learn how it underlies the nature of the cosmos. Mordecai-Mark Mac Low and Carter Emmart from the American Museum of Natural History take us on a tour of the Cosmic Web.

Mapping the universe's earliest structures with COSMOS-webb

by Space Telescope Science Institute

When NASA's James Webb Space Telescope begins science operations in 2022, one of its first tasks will be an ambitious program to map the earliest structures in the universe. Called COSMOS-Webb, this wide and deep survey of half a million galaxies is the largest project Webb will undertake during its first year.

With more than 200 hours of observing time, COSMOS-Webb will survey a large patch of the sky—0.6 square degrees—with the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). That's the size of three full moons. It will simultaneously map a smaller area with the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

"It's a large chunk of sky, which is pretty unique to the COSMOS-Webb program. Most Webb programs are drilling very deep, like pencil-beam surveys that are studying tiny patches of sky," explained Caitlin Casey, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-leader of the COSMOS-Webb program. "Because we're covering such a large area, we can look at large-scale structures at the dawn of galaxy formation. We will also look for some of the rarest galaxies that existed early on, as well as map the large-scale dark matter distribution of galaxies out to very early times."

(Dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or emit light, so it cannot be seen directly. We know that dark matter exists because of the effect it has on objects that we can observe.)

COSMOS-Webb will study half a million galaxies with multi-band, high-resolution, near-infrared imaging, and an unprecedented 32,000 galaxies in the mid infrared. With its rapid public release of the data, this survey will be a primary legacy dataset from Webb for scientists worldwide studying galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Building on Hubble's achievements

The COSMOS survey began in 2002 as a Hubble program to image a much larger patch of sky, about the area of 10 full moons. From there, the collaboration snowballed to include most of the world's major telescopes on Earth and in space. Now COSMOS is a multi-wavelength survey that covers the entire spectrum from the X-ray through the radio.

Because of its location on the sky, the COSMOS field is accessible to observatories around the world. Located on the celestial equator, it can be studied from both the northern and southern hemispheres, resulting in a rich and diverse treasury of data.

"COSMOS has become the survey that a lot of extragalactic scientists go to in order to conduct their analyses because the data products are so widely available, and because it covers such a wide area of the sky," said Rochester Institute of Technology's Jeyhan Kartaltepe, assistant professor of physics and co-leader of the COSMOS-Webb program. "COSMOS-Webb is the next installment of that, where we're using Webb to extend our coverage in the near- and mid-infrared part of the spectrum, and therefore pushing out our horizon, how far away we're able to see."

The ambitious COSMOS-Webb will build upon previous discoveries to make advances in three particular areas of study, including: revolutionizing our understanding of the Reionization Era; looking for early, fully evolved galaxies; and learning how dark matter evolved with galaxies' stellar content.

Goal 1: Revolutionizing our understanding of the reionization era

Soon after the big bang, the universe was completely dark. Stars and galaxies, which bathe the cosmos in light, had not yet formed. Instead, the universe consisted of a primordial soup of neutral hydrogen and helium atoms and invisible dark matter. This is called the cosmic dark ages.

After several hundred million years, the first stars and galaxies emerged and provided energy to reionize the early universe. This energy ripped apart the hydrogen atoms that filled the universe, giving them an electric charge and ending the cosmic dark ages. This new era where the universe was flooded with light is called the Reionization Era.

The first goal of COSMOS-Webb focuses on this epoch of reionization, which took place from 400,000 to 1 billion years after the big bang. Reionization likely happened in little pockets, not all at once. COSMOS-Webb will look for bubbles showing where the first pockets of the early universe were reionized. The team aims to map the scale of these reionization bubbles.

"Hubble has done a great job of finding handfuls of these galaxies out to early times, but we need thousands more galaxies to understand the reionization process," explained Casey.

Scientists don't even know what kind of galaxies ushered in the Reionization Era, whether they're very massive or relatively low-mass systems. COSMOS-Webb will have a unique ability to find very massive, rare galaxies and see what their distribution is like in large-scale structures. So, are the galaxies responsible for reionization living in the equivalent of a cosmic metropolis, or are they mostly evenly distributed across space? Only a survey the size of COSMOS-Webb can help scientists to answer this.

Goal 2: Looking for early, fully evolved galaxies

COSMOS-Webb will search for very early, fully evolved galaxies that shut down star birth in the first 2 billion years after the big bang. Hubble has found a handful of these galaxies, which challenge existing models about how the universe formed. Scientists struggle to explain how these galaxies could have old stars and not be forming any new stars so early in the history of the universe.

With a large survey like COSMOS-Webb, the team will find many of these rare galaxies. They plan detailed studies of these galaxies to understand how they could have evolved so rapidly and turned off star formation so early.

Goal 3: Learning how dark matter evolved with galaxies' stellar content

COSMOS-Webb will give scientists insight into how dark matter in galaxies has evolved with the galaxies' stellar content over the universe's lifetime.

Galaxies are made of two types of matter: normal, luminous matter that we see in stars and other objects, and invisible dark matter, which is often more massive than the galaxy and can surround it in an extended halo. Those two kinds of matter are intertwined in galaxy formation and evolution. However, presently there's not much knowledge about how the dark matter mass in the halos of galaxies formed, and how that dark matter impacts the formation of the galaxies.

COSMOS-Webb will shed light on this process by allowing scientists to directly measure these dark matter halos through "weak lensing." The gravity from any type of mass—whether it's dark or luminous—can serve as a lens to "bend" the light we see from more distant galaxies. Weak lensing distorts the apparent shape of background galaxies, so when a halo is located in front of other galaxies, scientists can directly measure the mass of the halo's dark matter.

"For the first time, we'll be able to measure the relationship between the dark matter mass and the luminous mass of galaxies back to the first 2 billion years of cosmic time," said team member Anton Koekemoer, a research astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who helped design the program's observing strategy and is in charge of constructing all the images from the program. "That's a crucial epoch for us to try to understand how the galaxies' mass was first put in place, and how that's driven by the dark matter halos. And that can then feed indirectly into our understanding of galaxy formation."

Quickly sharing data with the community

COSMOS-Webb is a Treasury program, which by definition is designed to create datasets of lasting scientific value. Treasury Programs strive to solve multiple scientific problems with a single, coherent dataset. Data taken under a Treasury Program usually has no exclusive access period, enabling immediate analysis by other researchers.

"As a Treasury Program, you are committing to quickly releasing your data and your data products to the community," explained Kartaltepe. "We're going to produce this community resource and make it publicly available so that the rest of the community can use it in their scientific analyses."

Koekemoer added, "A Treasury Program commits to making publicly available all these science products so that anyone in the community, even at very small institutions, can have the same, equal access to the data products and then just do the science."

COSMOS-Webb is a Cycle 1 General Observers program. General Observers programs were competitively selected using a dual-anonymous review system, the same system that is used to allocate time on Hubble.

The James Webb Space Telescope will be the world's premier space science observatory when it launches in 2021. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

Image: Hubble's treasure chest of galaxie

Provided by Space Telescope Science Institute

ANOTHER PALLISER TRIANGLE DROUGHT HAPPENED THIS SUMMER 2021

Are the Great Plains Headed for Another Dust Bowl?

Researchers say atmospheric dust in the region has doubled in the last 20 years, suggesting the increasingly dry region is losing more soil skyward

Buried farm machinery in Dallas, South Dakota during the Dust Bowl in 1936. (United States Department of Agriculture)

By Alex Fox

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
OCTOBER 23

A new study shows dust storms have become more common and more severe on the Great Plains, leading some to wonder if the United States is headed for another Dust Bowl, reports Roland Pease for Science. With nearly half the country currently in drought and a winter forecast predicting continued dry weather for many of the afflicted regions, dust storms could become an even bigger threat.

In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl was caused by years of severe drought and featured dust storms up to 1,000 miles long. But the other driving force behind the plumes of dust that ravaged the landscape was the conversion of prairie to agricultural fields on a massive scale—between 1925 and the early 1930s, farmers converted 5.2 million acres of grassland over to farming, reported Sarah Zielinski for Smithsonian magazine in 2012.

Hardy prairie grasses would have likely withstood the drought, but crops covering the newly converted tracts swiftly bit the proverbial dust, which loosened the grip their roots had on the soil. High winds then whipped that loose soil into the huge clouds that blanketed the landscape with dust, including 1935’s Black Sunday which lifted 300,000 tons of the stuff skyward.

Besides blotting out the sun, dust storms strip valuable nutrients from the soils, making the land less productive, and create a significant health hazard at a time when a respiratory illness is sickening people around the world, according to Science.

The new research, published earlier this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used data from NASA satellites and ground monitoring systems to detect a steady increase in the amount of dust being kicked into the atmosphere every year, reports Brooks Hays for United Press International. The researchers found that levels of atmospheric dust swirling above the Great Plains region doubled between 2000 and 2018.

According to the paper, the increasing levels of dust, up to five percent per year, coincided with worsening climate change and a five to ten percent expansion of farmland across the Great Plains that mirrors the prelude to the Dust Bowl. Together, the researchers suggest these factors may drive the U.S. toward a second Dust Bowl.

“We can’t make changes to the earth surface without some kind of consequence just as we can’t burn fossil fuels without consequences,” says Andrew Lambert, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the paper’s first author, in a statement. “So while the agriculture industry is absolutely important, we need to think more carefully about where and how we plant.”

Part of what allowed Lambert and his colleagues to tie the added dust in the sky to agriculture were clear regional upticks when and where major crops such as corn and soybeans were planted and harvested, per the statement. Ironically, much of the grassland that was converted to agriculture in recent years was not for food but for corn destined to become fodder for biofuels intended to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, Lambert tells Science.

Human-caused climate change is also making the Great Plains hotter and drier. In April, a paper published in the journal Science said the Southwestern part of North America may be entering a megadrought worse than anything seen in 1,200 years.

“The current drought ranks right up there with the worst in more than a thousand years, and there’s a human influence on this of at least 30 percent and possibly as much as 50 percent in terms of its severity,” as Jason Smerdon, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory who co-authored the study, told Smithsonian magazine’s Brian Handwerk at the time.

Just last week, a large dust storm struck eastern Colorado, reports Jesse Sarles for CBS Denver.

“I think it’s fair to say that what’s happening with dust trends in the Midwest and the Great Plains is an indicator that the threat is real if cropland expansion continues to occur at this rate and drought risk does increase because of climate change,” Lambert says in the statement. “Those would be the ingredients for another Dust Bowl.”

What Did Stonehenge Sound Like?

Researchers have developed a new understanding of what it meant to be a member of the inner circle

An eight-foot-wide model of the intact monument was placed in an acoustics-testing chamber. Researchers found that sounds emanating from near the center reverberated within the structure. (Science Direct)

By Richard Grant

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE |
JULY/AUGUST 2021

Stonehenge remains profoundly mysterious. We still aren’t certain who built it, or why they aligned its geometry with the summer solstice, or brought the smaller stones from 180 miles away, or what range of purposes it served. But every year scientists learn more about the great stone enigma on Salisbury Plain. Most recently, a team from the University of Salford, in Manchester, and English Heritage, the charitable trust that manages Stonehenge, made a breakthrough about the monument’s acoustical wonders.

Despite the lack of a roof, the research team has found, the original circle of 157 standing stones (only 63 complete stones remain today) once acted like a sound chamber. For people in the inner sanctum 4,000 years ago, the placement of stones would have amplified and enhanced human voices and music in a way that must have been spellbinding. If you were outside the circle, though, the sounds were muffled and indistinct. This finding has added credence to the growing consensus that rituals at Stonehenge were for a small elite.

The study was conceived by Trevor Cox, an acoustical engineer at the University of Salford. “Some acoustical research had already been done at Stonehenge, but it was all based on what’s there now,” Cox says. “I wanted to know how it sounded in 2200 B.C., when all the stones were in place.”

To find out, he borrowed a standard technique from architectural acoustics and built a scaled-down model. The tallest replica stones are approximately two feet high. Cox and his co-workers based the model on laser scans of Stonehenge that were provided by Historic England, the government agency responsible for preserving historic sites, as well as the latest archaeological thinking about the different construction phases and configuration of the original stones.

To create replicas, he 3-D-printed 27 of the stones. Then he made silicon molds of them and cast the other 130 stones. Some of the model stones were hollow plastic; cavities were filled with aggregate and plaster mix. The others were cast using a plaster-polymer-water mix. Gaps were filled with children’s modeling clay. All the replica stones were sealed with a cellulose car spray paint to prevent sound from being absorbed. Once the model was complete, he began experimenting with microphones and speakers, and measuring sound waves with a computer.

“We expected to lose a lot of sound vertically, because there’s no roof,” he says. “But what we found instead was thousands upon thousands of reflections as the sound waves bounced around horizontally.” These reflections would have produced “significant amplification—four decibels,” Cox says, as well as a powerful reverberation effect, meaning that the sounds would have boomed and lingered before fading away. “You can compare it to singing outside, and then singing in a tiled bathroom: Your voice sounds better in the bathroom.”

As modern people living in sound-reflective rooms and concrete cities, we are so accustomed to amplified, reverberating sounds that we barely notice them. In Neolithic Britain, however, people rarely heard them unless they entered a cave or a narrow rocky gorge. “It must have been magical to build Stonehenge, to make that massive community effort, to align it to the solstice, and then walk inside the circle and hear reverberating sounds,” says Cox.

He thinks it’s extremely unlikely that these acoustic properties were there by design, but once they were discovered, people surely would have exploited them. “Human ceremonies nearly always have speeches, singing or chanting,” he says. “We know there were musical instruments around—bone flutes, pipes, drums, horns—and they would have sounded amazing inside the circle. If you were important, you’d definitely want to be in there. If you were on the outside, not only was your view obscured, you couldn’t hear what was going on either.”

The next stage of research is to place scale replicas of people inside the henge, and find out how much sound they absorb. Cox has also been approached by a number of musicians who are eager to replicate the same precise reverberation in their recordings. “It’s an exciting thought for them,” he says. “Through a mathematical process called convolution, they can record their instruments to sound like they’re playing at ancient Stonehenge.”

To Adapt to a Changing Environment 400,000 Years Ago, Early Humans Developed New Tools and Behaviors

When the East African Rift Valley transformed dramatically, new weapons arose and trade expanded

An overview of the Olorgesailie basin landscape, where the archeological site exists that contains stone weapons and tools (Human Origins Program, Smithsonian)

Four hundred thousand years ago, extreme environmental changes rocked the East African Rift Valley. Fresh water periodically dried up, and vast grasslands faded away—taking with them the large grazing animals hunted by early humans. But ecological instability didn’t drive people out of the region or into extinction. Instead, it sparked them to adapt with major leaps forward in their behavior and culture. Early humans developed more sophisticated stone tools and weapons, expanded trade networks, and even evidenced the growth of symbolic communication.

That’s the key finding of an eight-year-long study published today in Science Advances that revealed the ecological context behind changes in early human lifestyle as seen through artifacts. Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and colleagues paired a sedimentary drill core holding a million years of Africa’s environmental history, with archaeological excavations from Olorgesailie, Kenya, to show these dramatic, simultaneous developments.

“Some pretty radical things were going on here,” says Potts. “A change began from reliable living conditions to an era of uncertainty and repeated disruption in those crucial conditions for life.”

Potts and colleagues spent nearly three decades studying 1.2 million years of human habitation at the Olorgesailie site. Until now the story has been one of two very different eras separated by a mysterious gap at a key point in prehistory. For 700,000 years, between 500,000 and 1.2 million years ago, life at Olorgesailie looked much the same. Thousands of tools and animal bones show that the same primitive stone Acheulean hand axes—sharpened but clunky hand-held chunks of rock—remained in vogue and large grazing mammals, the outsized relatives of zebras, elephants and even primates, inhabited the area.

Unfortunately, the geologic layers accumulated between about 320,000 and 500,000 years ago have long since washed away, with whatever evidence they once contained. That period turns out to be a key 180,000 year-long era of evolutionary flux. “The next time we pick up the story, 320,000 years ago, the hand axes are no longer around,” Potts explains. “They’ve been completely replaced by a new way of life and technology.”

As detailed in a trio of 2018 studies, which Potts and colleagues also authored, by 320,000-years-ago early humans had replaced fist-sized stone axes with smaller, sharper, more sophisticated blades and projectile points that evidenced Middle Stone Age technology. The cumulative behavior in the culture during the Middle Stone Age—modifying and improving upon the achievements of others—begins to appear regularly around Africa during this same period of time. And abstract thinking can be seen in the design of such tools. While making a hand ax basically involves improving an existing rock’s shape, making blades and points means the toolmaker must have begun by first visualizing the ideal shape of such a tool, then reworking the rock to serve that purpose

The materials chosen to craft some of those tools weren’t available locally. They evidence the expansion of ancient trade networks. Early humans sourced black obsidian for projectile points from at least 50 miles away. They also began to use color, chiseling red or black manganese rocks likely used to make pigments and adorn their weapons, or themselves—a practice scientists often associate with the development of symbolic thought.

Based on the recovery of thousands of bones, the area’s animal inhabitants changed as well. One of the 2018 studies concludes that a staggering 85 percent of local mammal species turned over during the same key period of ecological transition and changing early human behavior. “The large grazers disappeared after hundreds of thousands of years of typifying East African ecosystems, and they were replaced by animals more like what you’d see on safari today,” Potts explains. “What instigated such a change? [At the Olorgesailie site] we were missing the layers that could tell us what happened.”

To reconstruct the environment in which these changes occurred, the team turned to a site just 15 miles away, in the adjacent Koora basin—where the depression of an ancient lake ~~basin lies~~ can be seen beneath a grassy plain. In 2012, Potts’s team engaged a Kenyan company to drill a 456-foot-deep hole, less than two inches in diameter, and extract a sedimentary ~~drill~~ core preserving a record of one million years of the East African Rift Valley’s environmental history.

For nearly a decade, dozens of experts from institutions around the world delved into the core, analyzing microscopic organisms and plant remnants, and tracking seasonal and rainfall shifts in soils, to chart how the region’s environment changed over the past one million years. They found out that after hundreds of thousands of years of stability, dramatic shifts occurred beginning about 400,000 years ago—extreme swings occurred between wet and dry periods, lakes shrunk and new types of vegetation periodically replaced large grasslands. Geological evidence at Olorgesailie also shows how some 400,000 years ago earthshaking tectonic activity began to reshape the region—segmenting the landscape, raising hills and cliffs, and draining huge lakes—shifts that made the area more sensitive to changes like more variable rainfall.

Paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, notes that previous efforts to explore how ancient environment influenced evolution have been compromised because cores from distant oceans or lakes paint a global picture but miss how ecosystems changed locally, where ancient people lived. “It’s what’s been needed from East Africa for a long time, to have a core that ties in closely to a site with good evidence of human occupation covering a long period of time,” says Stringer, who wasn’t involved with the research.

Without large plains to sustain them the large grazing relatives of zebras, giraffes and elephants were replaced with smaller specimens. Baboons, for example, shrunk to only about one-fourth the size of their predecessor Theropithecus oswaldi. And without the giant “lawnmowers of the Pleistocene” and their constant browsing, entirely different vegetation sprouted. This one-two punch meant that early humans had to learn new ways to gather foods, as well as ways to hunt different animals.

Stringer notes that early humans were completely attuned to their local environment and knew how to exploit its plant and animal resources on a daily basis. “So changes in the environment meant that they had to learn completely new patterns of behavior and that’s an obvious pressure on the human population to change,” he says. “If hunter gatherers don’t adapt to the environment, they die.”

Since ecological changes have also occurred in more recent times, the authors pored over studies of more than 150 historically known and living hunter gatherer communities to see how they responded in similar situations. When resources become unpredictable, it seems, they often tend to respond in the same way the Olorgesailie inhabitants did. They’ve been observed to forage more widely, extend trading networks and invest more time and energy in their tools and technology.

University of Cambridge archaeologist and geochronologist Nick Blegen cautions that if ecological variability was a key driver behind the behavioral and cultural changes in early humans, we should also expect to see evidence of that variability at a wider sampling of early human fossil sites. So far, there aren’t enough quality environmental reconstructions like this one to know.

“As past environments are reconstructed from many East African rift basins, will they all show a shift from stable lake environments to variable lake and grassland ecosystems at the same time as hominins shifted from large handheld tools to more diverse technologies?” asks Blegen, who wasn’t involved in the research. “If so, then Potts et al. are on to something. If not, then we cannot blame an inconstant environment for everything, and we’ll have to find another explanation, or explanations, for the evolution of modern human behavior.”

And while more modern human behavior clearly developed at the site another major question remains—who exactly might these adaptable people have been?

Though tens of thousands of stone tools have been found, the site has so far yielded only one described early human fossil, a partial brain case of Homo erectus from about 900,000 years ago. But this species has only been associated with more primitive tools and isn’t known to have survived in the area as late as 320,000 to 500,000 years ago.

No fossils can be found from the key transitional period at the site because the layers that once might have held them have vanished. Homo naledi lived in Africa during this period but hasn’t been found associated with tools. Homo heidelbergensis likely persisted into the Middle Stone Age, but it’s not known if they ever adopted more modern tools.

Interestingly, both genetic studies and the oldest-known fossil evidence suggest that our own species, Homo sapiens, may have arisen during this time period, though perhaps not here in the southern Kenya rift. Middle Stone Age technology like that found at the Olorgesailie site is typically associated with fossils of Homo sapiens rather than other species. “It’s like these components are here in the behavior, in the archaeological record, that look like the root of human adaptability and that this occurred at the outset of our own species,” Potts says. “I think that we’re potentially dealing with some representative of an ancestral group to H. Sapiens.”

By Brian Handwerk

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
OCTOBER 21, 2020

‘Lost’ Marble Skull Sculpted by Baroque Artist Bernini Found Hidden in Plain Sight

Pope Alexander VII commissioned the work, which sat unidentified in Dresden for decades, as a reminder of mortality

A curator's archival research identified a previously unattributed marble skull as a lost masterpiece by Bernini. (© SKD / Photo by Oliver Killig)

By Isis Davis-Marks

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
JUNE 1, 2021

For decades, a skillfully carved rendition of a skull sat largely overlooked in Germany’s Pillnitz Castle. Who crafted the cranium has long been a mystery, but new research detailed in “Bernini, the Pope and Death,” an exhibition on view at the Dresden-based Semper Gallery, suggests the marble head’s creator was none other than famed Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

“Everybody had the same reaction to it,” curator Claudia Kryza-Gersch tells the Art Newspaper’s Catherine Hickley. “We were standing around a table, looking at it. The question of course was—who made it? And since it has Roman provenance, someone jokingly said ‘maybe it’s a Bernini?’”

Per the German Press Agency (DPA), Kryza-Gersch spotted the skull while preparing for a separate Caravaggio exhibition at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery). She then had it moved to the restoration workshop at the Dresden State Art Collections.

“There was something about seeing the object out of its glass case,” Kryza-Gersch tells the Art Newspaper. “I was so overwhelmed. It’s scary—it has an aura.”

Curious about the skull’s origins, the curator began researching it in the Dresden archives. She soon came across the papers of Raymond Le Plat, art advisor to Polish king Augustus the Strong, and found a reference to a “famous death head” sculpted by Bernini. Further investigation indicated that Pope Alexander VII, who led the Catholic Church between 1655 and 1667, commissioned the cranium within days of taking office.

According to the Gemäldegalerie’s website, the pope kept the eerily lifelike piece of white Carrara marble on his desk as a “reminder of the fragility of human existence.” Though a plague befell Rome shortly after his ascension, Alexander’s proactive response to the threat ensured that the city escaped relatively unscathed, as Taylor Dafoe reports for Artnet News.

Writing for Artnet News in 2017, Menachem Wecker pointed out that artists throughout history have created similarly macabre symbols. Inspired by the Latin phrase memento mori, which roughly translates to “remember you must die,” these paintings, sculptures, drawings and tokens seek to remind viewers of their own mortality. Though the objects may appear morbid to modern viewers, Artnet notes that they often carried “optimistic, carpe-diem messages” about making the most of one’s time on Earth.

After Alexander’s death in 1667, the head—“so realistically sculpted that it could almost be mistaken for a genuine human skull,” according to the Gemäldegalerie—was transferred to his nephew, a prominent antiquities collector. In 1728, Augustus acquired the marble sculpture, as well as 164 antique statues and four Baroque works. It was subsequently moved to Dresden.

Until recently, the Dresden State Art Collections had listed the skull as an unattributed work, notes a separate DPA report. Held in the archaeology department, it attracted little interest from curators more interested in ancient artifacts than modern ones. As a result, a supposedly lost masterpiece by one of art history’s most renowned sculptors remained hidden in plain sight for almost 200 years.

“This time, all the pieces came together like a beautiful puzzle,” Kryza-Gersch tells the Art Newspaper.

Born in Italy in 1598, Bernini displayed artistic talent from an early age. At just 8 years old, locals later claimed, he created a stone head that “was the marvel of everyone,” as Arthur Lubow wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2008. Bernini’s father encouraged the young artist to continue honing his craft, and by his mid-20s, he had established himself as one of Rome’s most preeminent sculptors. Among his famed creations are a life-size rendering of David, the triumphant Biblical warrior who slayed the giant Goliath, and an intricate depiction of Daphne, a mythological Greek nymph who transformed into a laurel tree to escape the unwanted advances of the god Apollo.

The newly identified Bernini skull—as well as a painting showing Alexander resting his hand on the marble sculpture—is on view in Dresden through September 5.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment