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The Gilded Image > Medieval Cafe
Who would believe this fashion could take off? It was not until 1463 that London banned the wearing of medieval pointy shoes. They were called crakows as they originated in Krakow, Poland. They were also called poulaines (after Poland), mostly made from leather with a very long pointed toe section. The most extreme examples were worn by men of the upper classes. One theory is that they were a reaction to the horrors of the Black Death, which wiped out up to 60 percent of Europe. Retail therapy? Paris banned them in 1368. Gothic peaked shoes for men enjoyed greater popularity in affluent European countries from the 12th century. Peaks were either ankle shoes with a drawstring fastening wound around the leg, or slip-on shoes. Made in one piece these were fashioned individually by a cordwainer and many were highly decorated. The toe extensions became longer and longer. The longer the toe the more masculine the wearer and sometimes small hawke bells (folly bells) were sown to the tip to gain attention and indicate an interest in sexual frolic. Some were 60 cm longer than the foot. But they were so cumbersome that knights couldn’t fight well when wearing them and had to cut off the toe tips. Swiss chroniclers report how a huge pile of these shoe-tips was found in a heap after one particular battle. During the reign of Edward III nobility were allowed 61cm pointed shoes; gentlemen could wear 31 cm extensions and merchants 16 cm.
A new exhibition: Power, Justice, and Tyranny in the Middle Ages, opens at the J. Paul Getty Museum Los Angeles from 25 May to 15 August. It showcases how medieval Europe struggled with many of the same issues of power and disenfranchisement that contemporary society faces today.
The Louvre Museum now has 75% of its collection or 482000 online items for you to explore. Click here to see just 10 of their medieval collection. This angel’s head comes from the famous mosaic of the Last Judgment in the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta on the island of Torcello near Venice. The work is attributed to a workshop of Byzantine mosaicists who worked in Venice and Torcello in the 11th and 12th centuries.
The image shows the famous Crown-of-the-Sultan-of-Siak embellished with three lotus flowers, rubies, and diamonds is thought to have been made for Sultan Assyaidis Syarief Kasyim I Abdul Jalil Syariffudin, who ruled until 1889.
You can read more about this exhibition here.
Gold is so malleable that just 1 gram can be hammered into a sheet 1 square meter in size. Major mining sources are China, Russia, Australia and Canada. The best estimates currently available suggest that around 193 million kg (or 193 000 tonnes) of gold have been mined throughout history.
To help picture what this looks like, imagine all this gold was shaped into 1 x 1 x 1 metre cubes. Each cube has a volume of 1 cubic metre or 1 000 000 cubic centimetres. One cubic centimetre of gold has a mass of 19.3 grams so each gold cube would have a mass of about 19.3 tonnes. (That’s very heavy compared to water, where a 1 x 1 x 1 metre cube would have a mass of only 1 tonne).
So we would be looking at about 10 000 cubic metres of gold mined on our earth so far. And as an Olympic swimming pool has a volume of 2500 cubic metres, then that’s enough gold to fill about 4 Olympic swimming pools.
Making gold leaf is the signature handicraft of Kanazawa. Pieces of a specially prepared gold alloy are passed through rollers that press them to a thickness of about 0.01 millimeters. The sheets of gold foil are placed between pieces of paper and stacked, and the stack is pounded to spread them and make them even thinner. The sheets are meticulously transferred to another stack of paper and pounded again. This process is repeated thousands of times, until the sheets have been thinned to 0.001 mm. Further pounding reduces the thickness to 0.0001, at which point the sheets are finally ready to be used as gold leaf. This material is so light that it is blown away by the smallest breath of air. Skilled workers handle it with a set of traditional bamboo implements. The final step is to cut it into squares of various sizes and mount it on sheets of mat board. From start to finish the process relies on the work of artisans specializing in particular tasks.
(Originally published in Japanese. Created in cooperation with Kanazawa Cable Television.)
You can watch the video here:
800 new medieval manuscripts are now available for you to explore online from the British Library, in association with Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The illustration is “Annunciation to the Shepherds, twelfth century psalter – BL, MS Cotton Caligula A. vii/l, f.6v”
Five decades of art publications are now available to read online or download. Titles include:
Afghanistan: Forging Civilisations along the Silk Road; The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry; The Emperors’ Album: Images of Mughal India; Orazio and Artemisia GentileschiWhat are you waiting for!
Isha Ambani is the daughter of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani. Her father’s wealth is valued at about $50 billion. They turned their business Reliance Industries into the world’s largest producer of polyester fibres and yarns. This company now exports one fifth of India’s products, including petroleum and mobile phones.
Her hand embroidered wedding dress used panels of gold, crystals and sequins. She was married on 12 December 2018. You can see a video of how her dress was made by clicking here. Aishwarya Rai and her husband Abhishek Bachchan danced at one of the wedding ceremonies.
Scientists have discovered small traces of blue lapis lazuli in the teeth of a female skeleton from a medieval grave in a German monastery. “The team studying the skeleton concluded that the woman, who was aged between 45 and 60, must have been a painter who frequently licked the end of the brush whilst painting.” “The woman was thought to be part of a group of about 14 women living at the monastery who were likely to have been wealthy, upper class, and educated.