Newer Than They Think / Art

• Much of the purportedly Pre-Hispanic Aztec, Inca and Maya pictorial artwork you can find today, while certainly ancient in artistic style, was actually created after the Spanish conquest. When Spanish missionaries like Bernardino de Sahagún arrived and started Christianizing the lands, they often engaged in parallel etnographic work where they would try to gather and translate all possible local knowledge with the help of recruited native talent (which is how we have the Mayan Popol Vuh today, for instance), and this means native artists usually retained their jobs and skills after converting. The old styles eventually mixed with European illustration techniques and gave birth to a style known as Indo-Christian.
• Auguste Rodin's The Thinker sculpture was made in 1902.
• Washington Crossing the Delaware is one of the most popular depictions of the American Revolution, though it was actually completed by Emanuel Leutze in 1851, 75 years after the event.
• The "tradition" of the diamond engagement ring is sometimes thought to have been the result of a 1940s de Beers ad campaign, but this is a slight exaggeration. The "tradition" of having a second, separate ring for the engagement (i.e., not just one for the wedding) actually began decades earlier, in the immediate post-World War I era; an expensive ring was intended as insurance that the man actually meant to marry the woman, and wasn't proposing just to get sex (Serious Business at a time when single women had literally no access to birth control and unmarried mothers were thought of as worse than street whores). De Beers merely piggybacked onto a trend that was almost universal by the time their first ads ran. They did however create the idea that an engagement ring should cost two months' salary— apparently a perversion of the long-standing rule of thumb that a house should cost two years' salary.
  • As well, most of the ideas surrounding the ring were at the very least played up and at the worst invented whole-cloth by De Beers' advertisers over the succeeding decades. See the idea that the size of the rock matters, the idea that selling or trading in an old engagement ring is bad luck, etc. Most egregious is De Beers completely making up the "rule of thumb" that a ring should cost the man two months' salary (in an effort to make it impossible to have one standard-sized ring that was "good enough").
    • Not to mention the idea that you should be buried with your diamond jewelry, in order to destroy the second hand diamond market and prop up the artificial scarcity.
    • Before that time a common engagement gift — not necessarily a ring — was acrostic jewellery: where the initials of the set gems spelled out words or names. REGARDS rings (Ruby, Emerald, Garnet, Amethyst, Ruby, Diamond, Sapphire) are acrostic jewellery, for example, although many rarer and unusual stones are required to fill other letters. Actual wedding bands, however, have reportedly been around since the Medieval period.
    • De Beers' real achievement was "a diamond is forever". This advertising campaign effectively destroyed (OK, vastly reduced) the supply of second-hand diamonds, which helped them keep their prices high.
    • They have also managed to smash Adam Smith's "invisible hand" by artificially inflating the rarity of diamonds. In fact, diamonds are not as rare as most people believe, in fact non fancy colored diamonds are are more common and cheaper than natural sapphires and rubies but the companies making up the de Beers consortium weren't willing to let market forces and competition reduce their profit margins. Good luck trying to explain it to people, though.
  • Wedding bands have existed for centuries, but of course weren't as common back when the masses could barely afford shoes and food, never mind gold rings. Rather than being symbols of eternal blah-blah-blah, they also symbolised exchange of wealth in return for marriage. One English account gives "with this ring I thee wed" followed by the words 'This gold and silver I give thee', at which point the groom was supposed to hand a leather purse filled with gold and silver coins to the bride. The unromantic Germans record the phrase "I give you this ring as a sign of the marriage which has been promised between us, provided your father gives with you a marriage portion of 1,000 Reichsthalers." In the 1920s, only 15% of marriages were two-ring affairs, men's wedding bands being slow to catch on.
    • No wedding rings were used at all in Japan until the 1990s, when De Beers started advertising there heavily.
  • In Russia, since the 15th century, iron wedding bands were often used for one of the sides. And in Judaism (Orthodox, at least), a rabbi will not agree to oversee a wedding with a gemmed band present — since it symbolizes the exchange of wealth, there should be no possibility of the value being unclear. As a variation of this trope, the use of rings to symbolize the exchange actually came from Rome — hence the groom's specifying that the wedding is according to the law of Moses.
  • Historically simple rings (i.e. wedding bands) in the early middle ages and were given as a symbol to seal an engagement among Germanic peoples. The bride accepted the ring to signify that she had been properly 'bought' and engaged.
• Most people consider the tradition of birth stones to be rooted in history, maybe derived from Western astrology or Jewish mysticism (alluding to the 12-jeweled breastplate of Israelite priests). The tradition actually dates from a Tiffany & Co. pamphlet from 1870 to encourage the sale of more "obscure" gems.
• The name Art Deco for the 1920s and 1930s design movement was popularised in the 1960s. In the 1930s people usually called it the Moderne style.
• The name Gothic for the 12th-to-15th century style of architecture and art was coined ca. 1550 by Giorgio Vasari as a pejorative name — he considered the "maniera de' Goti" barbaric. At the time Gothic cathedrals etc. were built, the style was called "opus francigenum" (French work/style) or "pointy-arched style".
• The Russian nesting doll, the matryoshka, was invented in 1890. (The painting styles were based on much older paintings. The nesting doll idea is based on an older Japanese toy).
• Most chalk hill figures in England are post-Medieval and many were carved in the 20th century. One of the most famous, the Cerne Abbas giant, often associated with ancient pagan religion and magic, seems to have been carved sometime in the 17th century. It's been suggested it was originally a caricature of Oliver Cromwell.
• Chauvet Cave, one of the pinnacles of Paleolithic art in Europe, was discovered on December 18, 1994. That's 54 years after Lascaux and 115 years after Altamira.
• Howard Chandler Christy's famous painting "Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States"◊ was created in 1940, 153 years after the event it depicts. Similarly, Jean Leon Gerome Ferris’s painting of “Writing the Declaration of Independence”◊ is from 1900, 124 years after the event it depicts.
• The Mona Lisa is genuinely pretty old, but it wasn't claimed to be one of Leonardo da Vinci's all-time masterworks until the 1860s, and it wasn't until 1911, when the painting was stolen, that those claims reached the general public (mainly by way of newspapers reprinting claims by Walter Pater that lionized it).
• The oft-parodied "March of Progress" image, showing the evolution of man from ape to human (see Parody of Evolution), was drawn in 1965 for the Early Man volume of Time/Life's Life Nature Library series by artist Rudolph Zallinger.
• Alebrijes are not an ancient Mexican folk art tradition; they were invented whole-cloth by artist Pedro Linares in 1936.
• The ubiquitous man and woman pictograms on public bathroom doors were first introduced for British Rail lavatories in the 1960s. They were introduced to the US in 1974 when the US Department of Transportation commissioned the American Institute of Graphic Arts to create a set of pictograms to be used throughout public transport networks, and they spread to the rest of the world from there.
• A number of medieval churches have had gargoyles, grotesques and other pieces of ornamentation added over the years that people sometimes assume are as old as the church itself. Leading some to conclude, for example, that Ridley Scott based the xenomorph on a certain gargoyle at Paisley Abbey, or that the Salamanca Cathedral's astronaut means there were astronauts in the 1500s.
• All those granite sculptures of the Ten Commandments marking the entrances of courthouses across the U.S. must have been around for at least as long as the buildings themselves, right? Actually, they were erected around the mid-1950s as part of a publicity stunt for the remake of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments.
• Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, perhaps the most famous German painting, was created in 1818, but completely obscure and unknown for over a century afterward. Its earliest known public exhibition was in 1939 and it did not start to be widely noticed until the 1970s.
• Tiki art is not a cultural tradition of Polynesian or any other culture, but rather, an American mish-mash of vaguely Polynesian iconography that arose in the 1930s. The name "Tiki" itself derives from Maori mythology, but any connection ends there.
• The iconic Charging Bull statue outside the New York Stock Exchange was installed in 1989, having been designed by Italian sculptor Arturo Di Modica in response to the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash.

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