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Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes
Exhibitions
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Forgery of St. John in the Archimedes Palimpsest on leaf 57r. Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, licensed for use under creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights.
Past eventSat., March 15, 2014, 12 a.m.–Mon., June 23, 2014, 11:59 p.m.
MaryLou and George Boone Gallery
In 1932, The Huntington's curator of manuscripts, Reginald Haselden, received a letter from Harold Willoughby at the University of Chicago, who had enclosed one of four illuminated manuscript leaves that an antiquities dealer was offering for sale.
New Exhibition Reveals “The Secrets of Archimedes”
RELATED TO THE EXHIBITION • VIDEO
In 1932, The Huntington’s curator of manuscripts, Reginald Haselden, received a letter from Harold Willoughby at the University of Chicago, who had enclosed one of four illuminated manuscript leaves that an antiquities dealer was offering for sale. Asked for his opinion, Haselden examined the manuscript closely and observed faint text beneath the painted illumination. After further research, he returned the leaf to Willoughby and shared what he’d learned. “I am glad I was able to run it down,” Haselden wrote. “I had a suspicion it might be Archimedes.” READ ON
Video - Turning Pages of the Archimedes Palimpsest
In this short video clip Abigail Quandt, Senior Conservator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at The Walters Art Museum, turns some pages of the book. It might surprise some people that Abigail is not wearing gloves. Actually it makes conservation sense. Her clean hands do no damage to the parchment and she can be more sensitive to the fragile folios if she is not wearing anything on them.
Neither The Huntington nor the University of Chicago opted to acquire the manuscript; its illuminations appeared to be forgeries and its ownership was dubious. The manuscript dropped out of sight until the 1990s, when it was offered for sale at Christie’s auction house in New York. The private collector who purchased it then deposited it at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore with the intention of having it conserved, digitally imaged, and—most importantly—read.
The incredible story of what happened next is told in the exhibition “Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes,” on view March 15 through June 22 in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery. Organized by the Walters, the exhibition is the result of more than a decade of extraordinary physical and scholarly work that revealed the oldest surviving manuscript of the Greek mathematician’s most important treatises, including two hitherto unknown texts. Those texts had all but vanished, victims of an act of Medieval “recycling.”
