Italian police officers stand next to Gustav Klimt’s painting “Portrait of a Lady” during a press conference in Piacenza, Italy on Friday.
By Claudio Lavanga and Henry Austin
ROME, Italy — A missing Gustav Klimt masterpiece that vanished from an Italian gallery, only for it to reappear within its walls 23 years later, has been confirmed by art experts as the original.
“It’s with no small emotion that I can tell you the work is authentic,” Ornella Chicca, a prosecutor in the northern city of Piacenza, told reporters on Friday at a news conference.
The “Portrait of a Lady” painting, valued at $66 million, vanished from the city’s Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery, during renovation work in February 1997.
Believing it stolen, Italian police launched a wide ranging investigation and came up empty handed.
Then in December, almost 23-years after it vanished, it was discovered hidden inside the gallery’s walls.
While clearing ivy, a gardener who has not been named, noticed a metal panel. He opened it and found a bag inside a space within the walls.
Museum employee Dario Gallinari told NBC News that he was coming back from his lunch break when the gardener told him they found something and handed him a trash bag.
“I immediately saw a corner of a painting sticking out of the bag and recognized it straight away,” he said, adding that he had seen pictures of the painting for his entire life, but never the original.
“I even remember the day it was stolen,” he said. “I was 9 and I was at school when I found out and we have lived with the mystery of its disappearance ever since.
“So you can imagine how emotional it was to have it suddenly in my hands. I immediately run into the museum and showed it to a colleague of mine. He also couldn’t believe his eyes.”
Painted between 1916 and 1917, the painting of the woman sensually glancing over her shoulder against a dreamy green background is a later work by the Austrian art nouveau master.
Its disappearance had been one of the art world’s biggest mysteries.
There had been widespread optimism in Italian art circles that the gardener’s discovery would turn out to be the missing Klimt.
Italy’s Piacenza Sera newspaper quoted gallery officials as saying the back of the canvas bore stamps that were put on when the painting was on loan.
Since its discovery, the work had been kept in a vault of a local branch of Italy’s central bank.
Claudio Lavanga reported from Rome and Henry Austin from London.
She was a fiery woman. His mother did not want the upper-class rich boy to marry the head-strong Irish daughter of a Women’s Rights activist. But, he did. E. Bulwer-Lytton’s mother cut him off from family funds from the large landholdings the Earle of Lytton collected from tenants and farmers and renters. So E. Bulwer-Lytton wrote novels and stories and articles and became popular and made enough money to live. But he and his wife, Rosina Doyle Wheeler, did not get along. Eventually they separated and she supported herself in part by writing novels. She wrote about 18 novels. E. Bulwer-Lytton was running for office to be elected to parliament on the Whig Party ticket and addressed a public meeting where his estranged wife got up out of the crowd to intervene with criticism of her husband and opposing his election. E. Bulwer-Lytton had powerful connections in government and had his wife arrested and put in an insane asylum.
Fortunately for Rosina Doyle Wheeler people outside the lock-up raised a public outcry against having a woman declared insane because she had strong personal and political opinions. She was released. This woman’s husband was a member of parliament and a diplomat at times and came into an Earlship with great wealth when his mother died. At one point he was offered the kingship of the country of Greece.
All Rosina Doyle Wheeler had was some writing skill, and a former husband who was an enemy who tried to have her locked up in an insane asylum. After E. Bulwer-Lytton died his son, who had been raised by his father after being taken away from his mother during the divorce, took his father’s side in the dispute between his parents and tried to manage the publicity after his father’s death in 1871.
But….interestingly, E. Bulwer-Lytton, who had been the number two novelist and publicly known writer just behind Dickens, began to fade from public attention. His story “The Last Days Of Pompeii” lived on, sort of, having ten different movies made with that title.
But often the works simply use the familiar title and create a new story. E. Bulwer-Lytton does live on with a half dozen phrases that he came up with and have lived on the tongues of hundreds of millions of people: Like – “the great unwashed”, “pursuit of the almighty dollar”, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, and “dweller on the threshold”.
Then came a sharp fall in his reputation, so that he is little read today. The sardonic 1982 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest claimed to seek the “opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels”
A Blighted Life is an 1880 book by Rosina Bulwer Lytton chronicling the events surrounding her incarceration in a Victorian madhouse by her husband Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton and her subsequent release a few weeks later.
Bulwer-Lytton was very popular while he was alive in the mid 19th century. But after he died in 1873 there was a sharp fall in his reputation, so that he is little read today.
A lot of stories have woven in some of the words of E. Bulwer-Lytton. I heard of him as a kind of 19th century pointlessly florid wordsmith stretching sentences out to paragraph length, it seemed.
Someone has a ‘bad writer’ contest in this man’s name. Many love to hate the beginning line of one of Bulwer-Lytton’s novels “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
This is not a modern style and can be difficult for today’s reader to jump right into. But, listen to this on an audio book with a professional deep voiced British actor who knows how to paint pictures with their words and the sentence works.
Bulwer-Lytton was one of the top selling novelists in the UK around 1860. He was second to Charles Dickens who was a friend and said Bulwer-Lytton was one of the greatest conversationalist he had ever spent time with.
Bulwer-Lytton was an elected member of parliament for the Whig Party and was engaged in politics and world affairs. He was offered the kingship of Greece. I just read that today. He was offer the kingship of Greece? What? Did he speak Greek? He was English. His books were widely translated and his political activities added to his prestige. So…. There is a story in that incident that I am interested in.
The man who is now mocked with a bad writing contest in his name with a long sentence as the egregious example added a number of phrases to the English language and idiom.
I watched a video of some of his sayings – he had a good way of expressing some truths.
Also another video about Bulwer-Lytton’s life
I started to listen to an audio book of a story by Bulwer-Lytton about an under ground Super Race living in a hollow Earth.
There was a lot of ideas from this 1870 novel that influence people who wanted to improve humanity or dream of super humans living right below them in a mystical Earth. Apparently people who wanted eugenic selective breeding of the human race also got a thrill out of reading the book, including German fascists like A. Hitler. So, that might be a little bit why Bulwer-Lytton has become a joke in name and respect for his voluminous work.
I first saw his name, which looked funny to me, on a Classics Illustrated edition of his most remembered work ‘The Last Days of Pompeii.’ One must give the man some credit as a storyteller when 10 different movies where made of this work.
A 1959 version with Hercules Steve Reeves ….
This is a long version from 1984 that I am curious to watch. About ten hours, at a quick glance.
A 1947 Classics Illustrated Cover.
So poor old Bulwer-Lytton gets a kind of revenge on the literary world, or the name brand memories. His stories and words and ideas live on in the consciousness of many, though they have no idea of him as the source. Good for him. I like his words and sentences and stories, mostly.
The History of the Peloponnesian War (Greek: Ἱστορίαι, “Histories”) is a historical account of thePeloponnesian War (431–404 BC), which was fought between thePeloponnesian League(led bySparta) and the Delian League (led by Athens). It was written by Thucydides, an Athenian historian who also happened to serve as an Athenian general during the war. His account of the conflict is widely considered to be a classic and regarded as one of the earliest scholarly works of history. The History is divided into eight books.
Analyses of the History generally occur in one of two camps.[1]On the one hand, some scholars view the work as an objective and scientific piece of history. The judgment of J. B. Buryreflects this traditional interpretation of the History as “severe in its detachment, written from a purely intellectual point of view, unencumbered with platitudes and moral judgments, cold and critical.”[2]
On the other hand, in keeping with more recent interpretations that are associated withreader-response criticism, the History can be read as a piece of literature rather than an objective record of the historical events. This view is embodied in the words of W. R. Connor, who describes Thucydides as “an artist who responds to, selects and skillfully arranges his material, and develops its symbolic and emotional potential.”[3]
Thucydides is considered to be one of the great “fathers” of Western history, thus making his methodology the subject of much analysis in area of historiography.[citation needed]
Chronology
Thucydides is one of the first western historians to employ a strict standard of chronology, recording events by year, with each year consisting of the summer campaign season and a less active winter season. This method contrasts sharply with Herodotus.
Speeches
Thucydides also makes extensive use of speeches in order to elaborate on the event in question. While the inclusion of long first-person speeches is somewhat alien to modern historical method, in the context of ancient Greekoral culture speeches are expected. These include addresses given to troops by their generals before battles and numerous political speeches, both by Athenian and Spartan leaders, as well as debates between various parties. Of the speeches, the most famous is the funeral oration of Pericles, which is found in Book Two. Thucydides undoubtedly heard some of these speeches himself while for others he relied on eyewitness accounts.
These speeches are suspect in the eyes of Classicists, however, inasmuch as it is not clear to what degree Thucydides altered these speeches in order to elucidate better the crux of the argument presented. Some of the speeches are probably fabricated according to his expectations of, as he puts it, “what was called for in each situation” (1.22.1).[4]
Neutrality
Despite being an Athenian and a participant in the conflict, Thucydides is often regarded as having written a generally unbiased account of the conflict with respect to the sides involved in it. In the introduction to the piece he states, “my work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever” (1.22.4).
There are scholars, however, who doubt this. Ernst Badian, for example has argued that Thucydides has a strong pro-Athenian bias.[5] In keeping with this sort of doubt, other scholars claim that Thucydides had an ulterior motive in his Histories, specifically to create an epic comparable to those of the past such as the works of Homer, and that this led him to create a nonobjective dualism favoring the Athenians.[6] The work does display a clear bias against certain people involved in the conflict, such as Cleon.[7]
Role of religion
The gods play no active role in Thucydides’ work. This is very different from Herodotus, who frequently mentions the role of the gods, as well as a nearly ubiquitous divine presence in the centuries-earlier poems of Homer. Instead, Thucydides regards history as being caused by the choices and actions of human beings.
Despite the absence of actions of the gods, religion and piety play critical roles in the actions of the Spartans, and to a lesser degree, the Athenians.[8] Thus natural occurrences such as earthquake and eclipses were viewed as religiously significant (1.23.3; 7.50.4)[9]
Rationalization of myth
Despite the absence of the gods from Thucydides’ work, he still draws heavily from the Greek mythos, especially from Homer, whose works are prominent in Greek mythology. Thucydides references Homer frequently as a source of information, but always adds a distancing clause, such as “Homer shows this, if that is sufficient evidence,” and “assuming we should trust Homer’s poetry in this case too.”[10]
However, despite Thucydides’ lack of trust in information that was not experienced firsthand, such as Homer’s, he does use the poet’s epics to infer facts about the Trojan War. For instance, while Thucydides considered the number of over 1,000 Greek ships sent to Troy to be a poetic exaggeration, he uses Homer’s Catalog of Ships to determine the approximate number of Greek soldiers who were present. Later, Thucydides claims that since Homer never makes reference to a united Greek state, the pre-Hellenic nations must have been so disjointed that they could not organize properly to launch an effective campaign. In fact, Thucydides claims that Troy could have been conquered in half the time had the Greek leaders allocated resources properly and not sent a large portion of the army on raids for supplies.
Thucydides makes sure to inform his reader that he, unlike Homer, is not a poet prone to exaggeration, but instead a historian, whose stories may not give “momentary pleasure,” but “whose intended meaning will be challenged by the truth of the facts.”[11] By distancing himself from the storytelling practices of Homer, Thucydides makes it clear that while he does consider mythology and epics to be evidence, these works cannot be given much credibility, and that it takes an impartial and empirically minded historian, such as himself, to accurately portray the events of the past.
Subject matter of the History
The first book of the History, after a brief review of early Greek history and some programmatic historiographical commentary, seeks to explain why the Peloponnesian War broke out when it did and what its causes were. Except for a few short excursuses (notably 6.54–58 on the Tyrant Slayers), the remainder of the History (books 2 through 8) rigidly maintains its focus on the Peloponnesian War to the exclusion of other topics.
While the History concentrates on the military aspects of the Peloponnesian War, it uses these events as a medium to suggest several other themes closely related to the war. It specifically discusses in several passages the socially and culturally degenerative effects of war on humanity itself. The History is especially concerned with the lawlessness and atrocities committed by Greek citizens to each other in the name of one side or another in the war. Some events depicted in the History, such as the Melian dialogue, describe early instances of realpolitik or power politics.
The History is preoccupied with the interplay of justice and power in political and military decision-making. Thucydides’ presentation is decidedly ambivalent on this theme. While the History seems to suggest that considerations of justice are artificial and necessarily capitulate to power, it sometimes also shows a significant degree of empathy with those who suffer from the exigencies of the war.
For the most part, the History does not discuss topics such as the art and architecture of Greece.
The History emphasizes the development of military technologies. In several passages (1.14.3, 2.75–76, 7.36.2–3), Thucydides describes in detail various innovations in the conduct of siegeworks or naval warfare. The History places great importance upon naval supremacy, arguing that a modern empire is impossible without a strong navy. He states that this is the result of the development of piracy and coastal settlements in earlier Greece.
Important in this regard was the development, at the beginning of the classical period (c. 500 BC), of the trireme, the supreme naval ship for the next several hundred years. In his emphasis on sea power, Thucydides resembles the modern naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose influential work The Influence of Sea Power upon History helped set in motion the naval arms race prior to World War I.
Empire
The History explains that the primary cause of the Peloponnesian War was the “growth in power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta” (1.23.6). Thucydides traces the development of Athenian power through the growth of the Athenian empire in the years 479 BC to 432 BC in book one of the History (1.89–118). The legitimacy of the empire is explored in several passages, notably in the speech at 1.73–78, where an anonymous Athenian legation defends the empire on the grounds that it was freely given to the Athenians and not taken by force. The subsequent expansion of the empire is defended by these Athenians, “…the nature of the case first compelled us to advance our empire to its present height; fear being our principal motive, though honor and interest came afterward.” (1.75.3)
The Athenians also argue that, “We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human nature in accepting an empire when it was offered to us and then in refusing to give it up.” (1.76) They claim that anyone in their position would act in the same fashion. The Spartans represent a more traditional, circumspect, and less expansive power. Indeed, the Athenians are nearly destroyed by their greatest act of imperial overreach, the Sicilian expedition, described in books six and seven of the History.
Thucydides’ History is extraordinarily dense and complex. His particular ancient Greek prose is also very challenging, grammatically, syntactically, and semantically. This has resulted in much scholarly disagreement on a cluster of issues of interpretation.
Strata of composition
It is commonly thought that Thucydides died while still working on the History, since it ends in mid-sentence and only goes up to 410 BC, leaving six years of war uncovered. Furthermore, there is a great deal of uncertainty whether he intended to revise the sections he had already written. Since there appear to be some contradictions between certain passages in the History, it has been proposed that the conflicting passages were written at different times and that Thucydides’ opinion on the conflicting matter had changed. Those who argue that the History can be divided into various levels of composition are usually called “analysts” and those who argue that the passages must be made to reconcile with one another are called “unitarians”. This conflict is called the “strata of composition” debate. The lack of progress in this debate over the course of the twentieth century has caused many Thucydidean scholars to declare the debate insoluble and to side-step the issue in their work.
Sources
The History is notoriously reticent about its sources. Thucydides almost never names his informants and alludes to competing versions of events only a handful of times. This is in marked contrast to Herodotus, who frequently mentions multiple versions of his stories and allows the reader to decide which is true. Instead, Thucydides strives to create the impression of a seamless and irrefutable narrative. Nevertheless, scholars have sought to detect the sources behind the various sections of the History. For example, the narrative after Thucydides’ exile (4.108ff.) seems to focus on Peloponnesian events more than the first four books, leading to the conclusion that he had greater access to Peloponnesian sources at that time.
Frequently, Thucydides appears to assert knowledge of the thoughts of individuals at key moments in the narrative. Scholars have asserted that these moments are evidence that he interviewed these individuals after the fact. However, the evidence of the Sicilian Expedition argues against this, since Thucydides discusses the thoughts of the generals who died there and whom he would have had no chance to interview. Instead it seems likely that, as with the speeches, Thucydides is looser than previously thought in inferring the thoughts, feelings, and motives of principal characters in his History from their actions, as well as his own sense of what would be appropriate or likely in such a situation.
Critical evaluations
The historian J. B. Bury writes that the work of Thucydides . . . “marks the longest and most decisive step that has ever been taken by a single man towards making history what it is today.”[14]
Historian H. D. Kitto feels that Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War not because it was the most significant war in antiquity but because it caused the most suffering. Indeed, several passages of Thucydides’ book are written “with an intensity of feeling hardly exceeded by Sappho herself.”[15]
In his Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl R. Popper writes that Thucydides was the “greatest historian, perhaps, who ever lived.” Thucydides’ work, however, Popper goes on to say, represents “an interpretation, a point of view; and in this we need not agree with him.” In the war between Athenian democracy and the “arrested oligarchic tribalism of Sparta,” we must never forget Thucydides’ “involuntary bias,” and that “his heart was not with Athens, his native city:”
“Although he apparently did not belong to the extreme wing of the Athenian oligarchic clubs who conspired throughout the war with the enemy, he was certainly a member of the oligarchic party, and a friend neither of the Athenian people, the demos, who had exiled him, nor of its imperialist policy.”
Influence
Thucydides’ History has been enormously influential in both ancient and modern historiography. It was embraced by many of the author’s contemporaries and immediate successors with enthusiasm; indeed, many authors sought to complete the unfinished history. For example, Xenophon wrote his Hellenica as a continuation of Thucydides’ work, beginning at the exact moment that Thucydides’ History leaves off. Xenophon’s work, however, is generally considered inferior in style and accuracy compared with Thucydides’.[citation needed] In later antiquity, Thucydides’ reputation suffered somewhat, with critics such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus rejecting the History as turgid and excessively austere. Lucian also parodies it (among others) in his satire The True Histories. Woodrow Wilson read the History on his voyage across the Atlantic to the Versailles Peace Conference.[16]
The most important manuscripts include: Codex Parisinus suppl. Gr. 255, Codex Vaticanus 126, Codex Laurentianus LXIX.2, Codex Palatinus 252, Codex Monacensis 430, Codex Monacensis 228, and Codex Britannicus II, 727.[17]
Grenfell and Hunt discovered about 20 papyrus fragments copied some time between the 1st and 6th centuries AD in Oxyrhynchus.
CAIRO — A video from Egypt showing a woman enduring a mob sexual assault on New Year’s Eve was deemed authentic by the country’s police Thursday.
The viral video has reignited long-running controversy over rampant sexual harassment in Egypt. Cases of mob violence against women have been caught on tape since the 2000s.
Surveys indicate that the vast majority of Egyptian women feel insecure in the streets. There were also multiple mass sexual assaults on women during political protests. But polls have found that most men and women in the conservative Muslim country believe harassment is justified if women dress “provocatively” in public.
The New Year’s Eve video showed several dozen men tossing around a screaming woman wearing a black miniskirt and fur coat.
Some of the men brandished sticks and jumped on top of a car, into which the woman eventually climbed. The handful of men who got her into the car were apparently trying to help her escape the assault, which took place in the Nile Delta town of Mansoura early Wednesday.
A senior police officer said the attackers have yet to be identified. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.
In October, Egypt was stunned when a teenage boy was fatally stabbed while defending a girl from sexual harassment. The three teenage attackers were each sentenced to 15 years in prison last month.
Egypt toughened its sexual harassment laws in 2014. A broader definition of harassment is now punishable by up to five years in prison.
But rights groups say authorities aren’t doing enough to combat the problem. Most women also remain reluctant to file complaints for fear of stigmatization.
“Can the Egyptian officials please stop denying the existence of sexual harassment in Egypt?” said Amel Fahmy, a women’s rights activist, in a post on social media Thursday.
“Our fight is far from over,” tweeted Soraya Bahgat, another rights activist. In 2012, she founded a volunteer anti-harassment group for political demonstrations, although the government effectively banned all public protests the following year.
But….interestingly, E. Bulwer-Lytton, who had been the number two novelist and publicly known writer just behind Dickens, began to fade from public attention. His story “The Last Days Of Pompeii” lived on, sort of, having ten different movies made with that title.
So poor old Bulwer-Lytton gets a kind of revenge on the literary world, or the name brand memories. His stories and words and ideas live on in the consciousness of many, though they have no idea of him as the source. Good for him. I like his words and sentences and stories, mostly.
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xenagoguevicene 