Art Detectives: Cabinet Edition

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Host: Some cabinets hold dishes or bedsheets or board games, but have you ever heard of a cabinet that held a mystery? Welcome to If Objects Could Talk, a podcast where art and artifacts come alive to tell their side of the story.

What is the oldest thing in your home? How old is it? And how would you prove its age if someone asked? Finding out how old an object is and where it came from is very important to museums. A lot of information can be gained by figuring out who previously owned something. This kind of research is so important, it even gets a special name: provenance. Sometimes though, the trail of clues doesn’t lead far back enough to tell us the first owner or maker, or how old an object really is. When that happens, people have to use other tools of discovery. They need to become real-life art detectives.

Today’s guest knows about art detective work. It’s a large wooden cabinet covered in carvings of vines, saints, griffins, and even the Greek god Apollo. It was likely used to hold linens or tableware up off the ground, away from the risk of damage from flooding or pests like rats. [rat squeaks] And for a long time, specialists thought it was a copy of a Renaissance cabinet from around the 1500s, but made hundreds of years later in the 1800s. But this cabinet is here today to share all about how old he really is, and how curators and conservators proved it.

[Mysterious music begins]

Cabinet: [deep voice with posh accent rhymes]
Come hear the tale of the most curious case
the researchers at Getty ever did face.
To locate the origin, both the place and the time,
of a very old cabinet told here in rhyme. [record scratches]

Top Panel: [younger voice] Told in rhyme by the, uh, older parts of the cabinet. [chuckles] Hi, I’m the top panel. I was built a bit later. He’s been telling me tales since, phew, I was brand new, and this is one of his, uh, most interesting tales, stories, uh, cases, as he calls them. Can you tell his favorite podcasts are mysteries?

[Mysterious music resumes]

Cabinet: [clears throat] The case in question.
Why, of course, that would be me!
Made of the finest wood from walnut and oak tree. [branches rustle]
I’m an imposing cabinet, over 10 feet high,
With four different levels reaching up to the sky.
I have three doors [doors slam] and drawers in my middle section, and one down below.
And since you can’t see me on this podcast, you’d probably like to know,
I am covered in carvings: flowers, griffins, even a Greek god!
But I have an origin story that’s a bit, well, odd.
I was purchased by Mr. Getty himself in 1971. [piano music]
Museum curators thought that I was fake, but he thought I was fun.

You see, real cabinets from the Renaissance are very rare.
Most are worn and broken, but I looked so fair. [crowd chatter]
“A copy,” they said, “though interesting to see.
It’s not as important as a real cabinet would be.”

They could not just trust word of mouth, or “of drawer”, as it were.
The curators needed evidence to back up such lore.

Proof of my past went as far back as 1846. [triumphant chord]
An engraving was made so my owner could have pics.
Of me! That’s right, and lots of other cool art, too.
To show off their collection, both old things and new,
They took a photograph later in 1861.
I had a brand-new base, and my top shelf was redone.

Top Panel: Oh, hey! That was me. We’ve been together for about 160 years. Time really flies. [Cabinet clears throat] Oh, uh, sorry, Gramps. Keep going.

Cabinet: Those pictures were as far back as researchers could go, until one day when
The Musée National de la Renaissance in France did an exhibit on Hugues Sambin.
Hugues was the head of a furniture shop in 1500s France.
Curators saw a fancy armoire by him, then took a second glance. [crowd says “hmm”]
It looked so very similar to me.
Did we have the same maker? Could it be? [triumphant music]

The Getty decided that the time was right
To take me out of storage and into the light.
The first tool they used to investigate me may come as a surprise.
It wasn’t fancy tech. They simply used their eyes. [rapid blinks]
It’s called “close looking”, examining for details:
Little marks left by woodworking tools [sanding] or holes from old nails. [hammering]
Rough marks on my back look like they were from a handsaw [sawing]
And there are dents from being held to a workbench by an iron claw. [creaking]
These were common tools to use in the 1500s, way back in the past.
The museum was discovering my long, long history at last!

Top Panel: Close looking can lead to all kinds of discoveries. You can see brush strokes in paint, weave in cloth, or carvings in wood just by using your eyes. But close looking was only the first step. After that, conservators had to go a little deeper, analyzing the wood inside the cabinet. Right, Gramps?

Cabinet: Yes. Conservators used a special methodology
To measure tree rings called dendrochronology.
You see, trees grow different amounts in a single year,
Depending on how hot it is or how much rain comes near. [thunderstorm]
This growth makes a pattern, and if you have wood with which to compare,
You can figure out which trees were nearby, when it grew, and where. [voice says “aha!”]
So a scientist found other wood with the same rings as me,
And discovered I’m from a region in France called Burgundy,
Cut down in the fall or winter of 1574. [trees rustling and chopping]
No one had ever thought I was that old before. [children say “wow!”]

Top Panel: Next time you see wood furniture, see if you can count the tree rings. Even if you can’t use dendrochronology to date it at home, it’s still so cool to see how much the wood grew each year. If you see rings with a similar size, it might mean the weather was similar for those two years. Of course, researchers couldn’t use dendrochronology for everything.

Cabinet: Next, they looked inside, opened up my doors and my drawers [drawers open]
And found some very old cloth that they could use to settle scores.
Snipped away a few threads and used carbon dating,
Which calculates age by how much something is deteriorating.
It’s not as exact as tree rings. It shows a big range of years.
But carbon dating turned out to be a good way to settle some fears [voice says “whew!”]
Because the cloth came from the same period of time as the wood. [triumphant music and clapping]
So for proving my age, that’s very, very good.

You see, researching history isn’t quite like a math equation.
There’s no true answer, and you can’t just, on occasion,
look up the perfect answer in the back of a book. [pages turn]
Instead, the journey starts by taking a look
at where the evidence points, finding the most likely explanation,
compiling all the details, and making sure to use citation.

Top Panel: Sometimes it feels like it would be much easier if there was a perfect answer every time. But when you’re dealing with history, there’s a lot of “probablys” or “most likelys”. People can’t always find 100% proof. But by using multiple methods of research, we can make our best effort to make sure we’re pointed in the right direction.

Cabinet: So one more piece of evidence important to my history:
It was found deep inside the secrets of my cabinetry.
A metal tack could be the key to separate truth from myths,
but only if you know a little bit about the workings of blacksmiths. [metal hammering]

Top Panel: Oh, oh! This is the part with the metal tack. It’s so fun and tacky. [laughs] In a good way.

Cabinet: [laughs] Little panel, you’ve heard it so often. Yeah, you should tell this one.

Top Panel: Oh, really? You think? Okay.

[Mysterious music]

Uh, so researchers also became interested in a loose metal tack that they found in a drawer. They polished tiny slivers of the metal [sheets rustling] and analyzed it under an optical microscope. [voice says “hmm”] Metal is made up of tiny crystal structures. [chimes] And when they looked closely, they could see that the crystal structures had a rounded shape. Now, this was very exciting. You see, modern metals are usually hammered [metal hammering] or stamped into shape [metal tap] which would make the crystal structure in the metal very different. The rounded shape means the metal was likely heated up and then poured into a mold to cool. [bubbling then sizzling] This was a common practice in the 1500s, but not today. So…

Cabinet: So it really looks like I’m celebrating my 450th birthday.

[“Happy Birthday” instrumental song]

What an adventure. What a journey through time.
The Getty looked at the past, not sure what they’d find,
But boy, am I glad they took a good look at me.
If you looked into your history, what would you see?

Top Panel: Oh, that was a great story. Okay, time for cake and a lot of candles.

[Theme music begins]

Host: I hope you enjoyed learning about provenance and conservation research. Join us next time when one cool horse comes into the studio. [horse chuffs] To see photographs of the cabinet and read more about its mysteries, visit our website at Getty dot edu slash IOCT. We’ve also got a listening guide with discussion questions and related activities there.

This episode was written by Claire Hupy and produced by Zoe Goldman. Brock Powell voiced the cabinet. Theme music, mixing, and sound design by Alexandra Kalinowski. Christopher Sprinkle is executive producer. Special thanks to curators Anne-Lise Desmas and Miriam Schefzyk, as well as Rebekkah Hart and conservator Arlen Heginbotham.

These stories are historical fiction. They’re based on historical facts and deep research, but we’ve filled in the gaps to make a good story. If you have questions about what you’ve heard, write to us at podteam at Getty dot edu. Catch you next time.