Fine Art meets....Football?

Seems as if friendly Superbowl wagers have moved beyond friends, family and co-workers and created a rivalry between city museums as well!

The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art have each wagered a piece from their permanent collection--albeit temporarily. If the New Orleans Saints win, Indianapolis has agreed to send The Fifth Plague of Egypt, a landscape by J.M.W. Turner, for three months.

If the Indianapolis Colts crush the Saints (I have to stand by my fellow Midwesterners!), the NOMA will send Ideal View of Tivoli by Claude Lorrain.



The choice of the work to be wagered was the subject of some friendly trash-talking between the two museums' directors. It seems that when John Bullard, the director of NOMA offered a portrait by Auguste Renoir, IMA director Max Anderson called it "sentimental blancmange" by a "China painter," referring to Renoir's job painting fine china. Bullard retorted that NOMA didn't have any "farm scenes or portraits of football players" to send to the IMA.


At least if the Colts lose, the IMA still gets to send a "plague," of sorts, to New Orleans.

Plague Vampire Unearthed in Venice

I had to post about this story because it involves two of my favorite things--plague and vampires.

Italian researchers believe they have unearthed the remains of a female "vampire" in a 16th century Venetian plague mass grave. The woman was buried with a brick in her mouth, a technique believed to stop vampires from "feasting on plague victims" after their death. This is the first forensic evidence researchers have that supports the medieval belief that it was actually vampires that were behind the spread of illnesses like the plague.

Like a lot of medieval supernatural beliefs, the superstition has a perfectly natural explanation. Medieval people believed vampires were behind the spread of pestilence due to their lack of understanding of the decomposition process: they uncovered recently deceased corpses to discover their hair still growing and (stop eating anything you might have in your hand here) blood coming from their mouths, and assumed these were sure signs of plague-related vampirism.

A more detailed article, with some interesting trivia about the "shroud-eaters" of yore appeared in the Times as well.

More photos of the excavation here. Happy Friday everyone!