Pigeons in the Prado

I've blogged before about my preference for museums that tell a clear story.  I just don't have the patience (or the creativity?) to form my own narrative from disconnected, poorly explained objects.  So I was really excited recently to visit two museums in Spain that, in their own very different ways, presented a fully formed idea with originality and panache.  This post is about the first of them: the Prado.

I know what you're thinking: unified vision? in an art gallery?! True, at their worst (let's face it, most of the time) they are just walls of paintings with little explanation - rooms full of canvasses only connected by the fact that the people who painted them came from the same country.  But from November to April the staid corridors of Spain's greatest gallery were subject to an invasion of curiosities.

If it hadn't been for the death of Charles III in 1788 and the subsequent Peninsular War, the Prado building would have housed the royal cabinet of natural history.  That was all the excuse Spanish artist Miguel Ángel Blanco needed to raid Madrid's natural history museum, which conserves what's left of the monarchy's collection of hunting trophies and other curiosities, and scatter 22 items in thought-provoking spots around the massive gallery.  Thus in a simple but startling way he recreated the royal Wunderkammer of the 18th century.

He clearly had a lot of fun doing it.  What would spice up Dürer's Adam and Eve? A serpent skeleton!  What would offset the witches in Goya's Great He-Goat? Two toads, a bat skeleton, a moose (really) hoof, and some brimstone!  And of course he couldn't raid the Spanish royals' hoard of stuffed animals without taking at least one bull - this imposing specimen graced Rubens' Rape of Europa.

But even these obvious juxtapositions, because so unusual in an art gallery, were thought-provoking.  It was perhaps a no-brainer to put a narwhal tusk alongside Varotari's Orpheus and the Animals, but it was still powerful in raising the historic cultural associations of unicorns and the natural material that was traded across the world in support of those myths.

And there were more subtle allusions too.  A glowing review in the Times Higher Education singled out the tiny albino sparrow perched high above the massive Las Meninas. Blanco imagines it outside the window looking in at the royal court - its placement so high up complemented the airy composition of the painting.

Blanco had written explanatory labels for each pairing, explaining why he had chosen the object to accompany the painting and what features of each he was trying to draw out.  These plaques were not intrusive - anyone wanting to construct their own narrative was free to do so - but they provided a starting point for visitors to think through the juxtapositions.

I loved how this exhibition made me look and look again at the paintings, forcing me to consider not only their subject matter but also their cultural connotations, both at the time they were produced and today.  How many still lifes full of meat have we admired, without thinking of the animals that died to fill the larders of the seventeenth century?  Blanco chose a squab to accompany a painting by Juan Sánchez Cotán; his bodegón has been thought austere, but it was opulent compared with the spare skeleton of the pigeon chick alongside it.  What are we to make of the fact that the hanging pheasants are somehow more beautiful in two-dimensional death than the vestiges of the chick that never reached full maturity?

So Blanco still left plenty of questions unanswered.  But by taking a clear premise - putting the natural historical collections of the royal family back alongside their more familiar art collections - he told a simple story very well, making me think much more deeply about the Prado's artworks and their significance.

What about the second museum, I hear you ask!  Come back soon to hear all about a tiny treasure in Burgos!

The Encyglobedia hits the news

In between all the mince pies and playing with my new toys, I had an interesting lesson in media relations last week as a little piece of research I did attracted quite a bit of press attention.

Early on the morning of the 28th, I was barely awake and leafing through The Times as I worked up the energy to go for a run... and was surprised to come across this little item on page 24:

That report was based on a little research project I did for my master's last year (summarised here on the Whipple Museum website).

It got better: a longish article (with my name!) in The Independent, a "big picture" feature on the BBC News website, articles in a bunch of other papers including the Irish Independent and the Belfast Telegraph, and even being called an "expert"! (OK, that was in the Cambridge News.)

Even more exciting was when I was contacted by two descendants of the globe's maker, a man who I'd been able to find almost nothing about.  They had read the story in a Spanish newspaper (possibly this one) and contacted me through this blog to share what they know of their (great) grandfather. One of them even has a very similar globe that he made!  I'm still looking into the leads they gave me, and hope to blog soon about what I find.

How did all this come about?  Well, to cut a long story short, the lovely PR people at Cambridge were looking for some research to feature in their Research Horizons magazine.  My investigation into this globe was nicely self-contained, had some very pretty pictures, and provided some well timed publicity for the Whipple's new globes gallery.  So my research got written up into a little article for the Cambridge University website, with a short accompanying film:




Even after all this (and even when I heard that the Press Association had shown interest in the story), I didn't expect it to spread so widely.  Frankly, I didn't see how "The World Inside a Spanish Globe" was news.  But I hadn't foreseen the "angle" that most newspapers went with: the idea that the globe represents an interactive style of education, which we tend to think of as a modern innovation.  This was something that I had touched on in my research, but only tentatively; I am very interested in education (I used to be a teacher) but know little about its history, particularly in Spain.  Most of the contemporary sources I'd read were educational philosophy - I didn't have much hard evidence about how that philosophy was put into practice.  And above all, I'm not certain that the globe was used in a school - it could equally likely have been an expensive toy for a wealthy family (though in that setting it would still have been educational, especially since many children were home-schooled).

So overall I would say that the reports did distort my research slightly, but not to an unreasonable extent.  And in hindsight it's easy to see why there was so much interest.  Here's four things I've learned; you might find them useful if you too want to be interviewed on local radio!

1.  A short, simple bit of research (like my six-week master's project) is easily summarised in a 400-word newspaper article, especially when it takes a case study approach, as my work did.
2.  And research that comes accompanied by pretty pictures is always going to be attractive.
3.  If there's a way the research can be spun so it has a topical message, it will sell well.
4.  Most importantly, if you want your research to spread widely, publicise it in a slow news week!  With nothing else to report but the Queen's speech and the content of the New Year's Honours, the way was clear for my "encyglobedia" (a name that provoked decidedly mixed reactions, by the way).

Happy New Year!

Croissants and Communication at the Catalan Congress

"my" globe

I have just returned from the XII Trobada (twelfth congress) of the Societat Catalana d'Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (SCHCT - Catalan Society for the History of Science and Technology).  This conference was held in Valencia, Spain, and I was honoured to be able to attend and present a paper on a globe in the collection of the Whipple Museum here in Cambridge.

I thought I would post some thoughts on this conference while it is still fresh in my mind.  It was my first academic conference, so I can make no direct comparisons, but I still came away with some strong impressions.

First and foremost, I thought it was a well organised, wide-ranging conference.  The venues were ideal and the hospitality arrangements were excellent: good accommodation and plentiful refreshments (hence the title of this post) certainly made a favourable impression on me! The talks were well scheduled and, although the focus was naturally on Iberian (and especially Catalan) subjects, impressively wide-ranging.  Most speakers managed to produce succinct, interesting 15-minute talks, though a disappointing number of people chose to read from pre-prepared scripts and PowerPoint was not always well used!  Here and there there were stimulating questions that led to interesting discussions.  Overall, then, I had a fantastic time and got a great deal out of the experience.

The striking (and controversial) Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències

All that said, here's what this blog post is really about: the issue of language, which is undoubtedly where the conference made its strongest impression on me.  Since this was the Catalan Society of the History of Science and Technology, you probably won't be surprised by the following breakdown of languages: of 104 presentations at the conference, 66 were in Catalan, 33 (including mine) were in Spanish, and 5 were in English.  Also probably unsurprising is the fact that 40 of the presentations were given by representatives of just two universities: the University of Barcelona and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Now, I'm really not sure what I think about this.  Of course I'm in favour of cultural diversity and I'm aware that languages are becoming extinct at an alarming rate (check out the World Oral Literature Project, based at Cambridge and Yale, if this is a subject that interests you).  I'm also aware that Catalan language and culture, in particular, were suppressed for forty years during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.  It is surely positive for people to be able to present papers at academic conferences in their native language, and for a language to be used in the full range of possible registers and settings (rather than narrow domestic, non-literary settings, as might happen).

But the fact is that there was no-one at that conference who spoke Catalan but not Spanish; all 66 of those talks could have been in Castilian.  Now, most people who speak Spanish can probably follow the general gist of a presentation in Catalan (especially the relatively comprehensible Valencian dialect; not so much the Barcelona accent, and much less the dense Balearic version), but it is certainly going to limit their ability to grasp its finer points, and particicipate in discussions.  If the organisers are proud of the growing international nature of their conference (there were speakers from the Czech Republic, Mexico, Portugal and the UK) and want that trend to continue, wouldn't they be better off encouraging presentations to be given in Castilian?  Wouldn't it better serve the purpose of breaking down barriers between academics, promoting the history of science and publicising their impressive research achievements?

Still, members of the Catalan Society are rightly proud of their achievements: by all accounts it is thriving, more active than its Spanish counterpart.  If they can't give presentations in Catalan at their own biennial conference, when can they?  At a time when Catalan independence is very much in the news, this is clearly a live political issue - apparently the hostel I was due to stay in cancelled the Society's booking when they heard who had made it.

What do you think?  Is it bigoted of me even to raise the issue?  I should emphasize that in general I was content to listen to talks in Catalan (I tweeted from many of them; they're collated here), though I obviously got more out of those in Spanish.  There was just once I found it a little irritating: after a talk in Catalan, I asked a question in my competent but obviously accented Spanish.  The speaker replied in Catalan.  To me, that was just plain rude, but it was the exception: most conference-goers were happy to speak Spanish or even English, and there were some native speakers of Catalan who gave their presentations in Castilian.

In the Friday evening plenary, Charles Withers of Edinburgh University presented a talk entitled "Place, Space, Nation, Globe: Thinking about the Geographies of Science."  Using the examples of the Scottish Enlightenment, the development of Scottish identity through map-making, and the late-nineteenth-century prime meridian debates, he argued that we need to understand the importance of place and space (in both literal and figurative senses) to the development of knowledge; not only how knowledge is made in certain places and situations, but also the transactions between them.  These ideas are hardly revolutionary - Withers acknowledged his debt to a range of thinkers, from Bruno Latour to Jim Secord - but the talk certainly got me thinking about the ways that science and its history are communicated, not to mention the multi-layered geographies of Spain.

That's enough from me - I look forward to your comments.  I'm off to listen to the new BBC Radio 4 series "The Invention of Spain".  Its webpage quotes historian Felipe Fernández Armesto: "I can't imagine Spain ever cohering.  If it did, it wouldn't be Spain."

A Spanish "Encyglobedia"

Just published a new article on the Whipple Museum's "Explore Collections" site.  Here it is:

http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/explore/globes/aspanishencyglobedia/

Not about an astrolabe this time, but a curious globe - here's a picture: