Lost and Found:
The Secrets of Archimedes
Oct. 16–Jan. 1
The Walters Art Museum
410-547-9000; thewalters.org
A technological detective story spanning 2,300
years, the history of the exhibit begins in the 3rd
century B.C., when the brilliant Greek mathematician and scientist Archimedes set down diagrams
and writings on a set of parchments. Over the
centuries, the parchment was scraped and
reused, was briefly rediscovered in a Constantinople monastery in 1906, was lost in the turmoil
of World War I, and then was bought at auction in
1998 by an anonymous collector who underwrote
the 10 years of digital technosleuthing that it took
to look deep into the parchment layers.
“We went to the ends of the earth,” says curator Will Noel. Ultraviolet, infrared, X-ray and other
modern imaging techniques from all over the
world were applied to tease out seven ancient
texts (including three that are the only known
copies of a particular work). The exhibit traces
that process.
“This isn’t just for math nerds,” says Noel. “It’s
a show about the rediscovery of information written by a great mind thousands of years ago, and
the story of 10 years of an extraordinary collaborative enterprise to undo the effects of time.”
Ultraviolet image
of a diagram from
The Archimedes
Palimpsest, found in
the treatise “Spiral
Lines.”
© Owner of The Archimedes
Palimpsest
Mending splits and tears on fols.
4-5 with remoistenable tissue.
© O wner of The Archimedes Palimpsest
ARCHIMEDES/JOHN DEAN PHO TOGRAPH Y
A Song for the Horse Nation
Opens Oct. 29
National Museum of the American Indian
202-633-1000; nmai.si.edu
Horses had been extinct for thousands of years in the Americas until their
reintroduction by Christopher Columbus. Among Native Americans, says
National Museum of the American Indian curator Emil Her Many Horses,
“there’s a saying that that’s the only good thing he brought.” Once
brought, however, the rest is literally history.
This exhibit shows how the horse changed almost every aspect
of American Indian culture, including travel, trade, warfare, hunting,
displays of wealth and status, and even surnames. “Many people took
names associated with horses,” explains Her Many Horses—his own
family among them.
On view among the more than 100 artworks, life-sized manikins,
rifles and other objects are a 16-foot-high Sioux tepee, its walls painted
with scenes depicting the horse-raiding feats of the 19th-century warrior
who lived in it. The wartime art of horse raiding is then brought into the
present with a video of Joe Medicine Crow, who received the Presidential
Medal of Freedom from President Obama for being a role model and
continuing the preservation of his culture.
Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty (Assiniboine/Sioux, b. 1969)
Horse mask, 2008. Porcupine quills, seed beads, brass buttons, feathers
and hide. (26/7046).
