The Portland Vase is Vandalized
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
At 3:45 p.m. on Friday 07 February 1845–180 years ago today — the Portland Vase was destroyed in an act of vandalism. The Portland Vase is one of the greatest works of cameo glass to survive from the ancient world. Cameo glass is a difficult technique to master and it hasn’t been a common medium for artistic expression. Only a handful of cameo glass masterpieces have survived from the ancient world, and many of them are reassembled from fragments.
Artists of the Middle Ages recognized the rarity of value of cameos and sometimes incorporated surviving cameos into their own art. The cross of Lothair, believed to have been made around AD 1000, incorporates a cameo of Augustus, which is supremely ironic to have a Roman imperial symbol smack dab in the center of a Christian symbol, taking pride of place, as it were. The crown of Sancho IV incorporates two Roman cameos, one of Drusus the Younger and one of the legendary Queen Omphale of Lydia. Here the symbolism seems more consistent, as medieval monarchs wished to be identified with ancient royalty as the legitimate heirs to that historically sanctioned authority.
The Portland vase was discovered about 1600, one story being that it was found in the sarcophagus of emperor Alexander Severus, the successor of the disastrous Elagabalus. It passed through several hands, being known for a time as the Barberini Vase because it was in the collection of Pope Urban VIII, a scion of the Barberini family. It passed through more hands and eventually came into the possession of William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland, and since then it’s been known as the Portland vase. The duke lent the vase to the British museum supposedly for safekeeping, and it’s been on display in the British Museum starting in 1810.
It was while it was on display at the British Museum that a visitor to the gallery threw a statue onto the glass case holding the Portland Vase, shattering both the glass case and the vase. The fragments of the shattered vase were retained. There’s a watercolour by Thomas H. Shepherd of the Portland Vase fragments from later the same year it was shattered, presumably painted as part of the process of the first reassembly of the fragments in 1845. A century later in 1948 the vase was taken apart and reassembled using several fragments that had not been incorporated into the earlier reconstruction. In 1988–1989 it was again restored, with this restoration predicted to be good for about another century. Perhaps it will be restored again near the end of the present century.
There’s something deeply disturbing about a delicate artifact having survived for almost two thousand years being casually destroyed in an act of mindless vandalism, but this happens with some frequency. No sooner are artifacts dug up than many of them are promptly destroyed. Archaeologists emphasize that the excavation of a site is also the destruction of the site, meaning you can’t dig that site again — at least, not in the same way. Since Heinrich Schleimann excavated Troy other archaeologists have gone to the site not only to excavate remaining pristine parts of the site, but also to dig through the rubbish heaps that Schleimann left. So there is a sense in which a cite can be excavated more than once, but there is a catastrophic loss of information with each excavation.
But it’s not only the destruction of the site that’s excavated, it’s also usually the beginning of the rapid deterioration of the artifacts uncovered. Artifacts survive because they happen to have been put in a place or wound up in a place that was conducive to their preservation. Once taken out of this naturally preserving context, they begin to degrade. In many cases, it’s better for the artifacts themselves that they remain buried, as to be discovered is to be at a greater risk of destruction than to remain hidden. For example, glass is among the most fragile and beautiful of ancient artifacts to infrequently survive the tumult of history. If a piece of glassware survives buried in the ground, it could remain there in principle until that piece of earth’s crust is pushed down into the mantle. If the glassware is excavated, it is immediately vulnerable. There was a display case of 74 ancient glass vessels at the Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut in Beirut, Lebanon, that was destroyed by an explosion on 04 August 2020. While the definitive cause of the explosion isn’t yet clear, this was not a casual act of vandalism like the destruction of the Portland Vase, but the apparent “protection” of the museum was again little protection for these fragile artifacts. It doesn’t matter whether the damage is intentional or unintentional, random violence or planned destruction, the result is the same. And, again, destruction is followed by attempted restoration, as specialists sort through the glass fragments and reassemble them.
The Portland Vase was reassembled, and has been taken apart and reassembled several times since, each time the restorers being able to reintegrate more of the fragments, which were saved after the original act of vandalism. These reconstructions are themselves an interesting story, and it is part of a larger story of the attempt to rescue and restore artifacts that have been destroyed, and the improving technology for doing so. No sooner is an artifact discovered, than it’s subject to vandalism, and no sooner is an artifact subject to vandalism, than an effort is made to restore it. In my episode on Eugene Viollet-le-Duc I said that very few buildings from classical antiquity have survived intact into the modern world, which is a similar case. Buildings are much more robust than cameos or glass, but buildings are large, they attract attention, and they become quarries for later construction. We may well have more intact cameo glass from the ancient world than intact ancient buildings, depending on how we define “intact.”
The artifacts that have survived buried in the ground or shut into tombs could in some cases remain there indefinitely in a preserved state. As the technologies and techniques of surveying sites improves, we can learn a lot from ground penetrating radar and LIDAR, but we’re never going to learn as much from this as we would learn from a scientific excavation of a site. But the decision of whether or not to excavate a site doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Looters will dig up sites that archaeologists haven’t excavated, doing far more damage and yielding far less knowledge. The argument could be made that even a poor archaeological excavation is to be preferred to allowing a site to be looted, since we can’t or won’t bear the cost of guarding all archaeological sites.
Say we leave all these problems aside, and we suppose that continue to excavate archaeological sites, deriving as much scientific knowledge as we can from the sites and also uncovering ancient artifacts. What do we do with the artifacts? Hopefully, we conserve them and display them in museums for the edification of the public. The technologies and techniques of conservation are improving all the time, and contemporary museums can provide an environment for the conservation of artifacts that could in principle be extended indefinitely. In this way, the deterioration of excavated artifacts can be limited or arrested as long as we can continue this.
But how long will this regime last? What happens to museums when civilizations collapse? When social institutions fail, and the electricity goes off and doesn’t come on again, all of the climate controlled conditions inside museums will end, and at that point any artifacts would have been better off left where they were in the ground. If we assume that civilization in something like its current form will endure for as long as humanity endures, so that when civilization ends humanity also end, and there is no longer any human reason for our artifacts to be conserved, that’s one way to dispose of the problem. But it’s at least equally likely that civilization will pass through many cycles of development and collapse during the time that remains for humanity, so that each collapse of a civilizational regime will mean artifacts abandoned in museums, beginning to degrade, being looted, dispersed, and lost for good.
There’s a scene in the Battlestar Galactica television series, the second one in the present century and not the original one in the previous century, where some of the characters return to an abandoned museum on Caprica, with the displays still in their glass cases, which is the immediate aftermath of the end of a civilization imagined. The next stage is to imagine the abandoned museum slowly collapsing on the artifacts and burying them again. Just as there is a catastrophic loss of information with each excavation of an archaeological site, there would be a loss of artifacts with each re-burying of them, since those artifacts that survived their first burial are in no way guaranteed to be fortunate in their second burial.
The next stage to imagine is something like in the novel The Mote in God’s Eye, where the “Moties” as they’re called, live on an isolated planet and have passed through many cycles of expansion and collapse of civilization. There are large museums on the planet that are protected by locks that require a given threshold of scientific sophistication to open. Once a recovering society on the Motie planet reaches this level of sophistication, they have access to the museums and then learn about the deep past of their planet. We could do something like this on Earth, but we aren’t yet at a level of technological development that we could build such a museum that could survive a catastrophe intact and only admit later generations when they reach a given level of sophistication. In any case, we can see that these and similar ideas have been entertained in science fiction, but they won’t remain science fiction forever. They are, or will be real problems for us someday.
We could design museums so that they continue to protect the artifacts they house even after the staff is gone and the electricity is off. That won’t stop looters, but it would tend to the preservation of artifacts not regarded as worth looting. We could exhaustively document artifacts and then inter them in some way that they would likely be preserved over the longue durée. This is already being done to some extent. For example, the damage to Lascaux cave caused it to be closed to all visitors. A reproduction has been opened nearby the original cave, but I can say from my own perspective that I wouldn’t even bother to visit the reproduction. Nor would I be interested in a virtual visit. One of the reasons I visit museums is to see actual artifacts with my own eyes, and not to look at a picture in a book. It’s not the same, but I understand why it’s being done.
The particular admixture of artifacts from the past that any one of us is able to see in our life is a function of the period of history in which we live. If I had lived between 1940 and 1963, I might have been able to see the Lascaux cave paintings with my own eyes, but at present that’s not a possibility. There are probably many caves of prehistoric art still undiscovered, still preserved in their pristine state, and some of these may yet be discovered in the future, long after I’m dead, and some may never be discovered. To take another example, I hope that I live long enough to learn that the tomb of Nefertiti is discovered, and in this case I would be happy just to see photographs of the artifacts and paintings it contains, as I probably wouldn’t be able to see the tomb itself. But at the present time, viewing the tomb of Nefertiti and its artifacts is not an option.
A couple of times the accidents of history worked in my favor. As a child I saw the King Tut exhibit when it came to Seattle in 1978, which was the first time in my life to see something truly ancient with my own eyes, and not merely in a photograph. It made a deep impression on me. And a few years ago I had the remarkable good fortune to be in a city when the Bactrian Hoard was on display. I never imagined that I would lay my own eyes on this, but there I was, shuffling past the glass cases of gold artifacts with hundreds of others. As it turns out, my seeing the Bactrian Hoard was even luckier than I realized at the time. The treasure was discovered in 1978 by a Soviet archaeologist, but not long after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 it disappeared. The treasure surfaced again in 2003, but, with the Taliban regaining control of Afghanistan, the treasure has again disappeared. I had an opportunity to see it during the brief window between 2003 and 2021 — less than twenty years. We can’t know if it will surface again. Perhaps it will; perhaps it will appear again long after I am dead. But I’m truly grateful that I got to see this treasure in its brief period of public exhibition.
This was an historical accident that has shaped my view of the past. Similarly, the particular admixture of artifacts that others have viewed in the past, or that others will view in the future, shaped or will shape their view of the past, hence their relationship to the past, hence their place in history. Museums are intended to give us a comprehensive view of our place in history, but they are as much at the mercy of history as any individual. They are a record of the past, but also of the present — a record of what the present holds of the past, which is always changing. This may sound like an odd reflection, but there’s actually quite a bit more to say about this. It’s related to my recent new series of thought experiments in civilization, and I hope to soon release another episode of this. Also it’s related to a manuscript I’m working on about the historical vicissitudes of value, our relationship to the past mediated by value, and especially the fate of value over the longue durée, so here’s hoping that I’m able to finish at least some of this work and offer a fuller exposition of the ideas that I’ve touched on here.
