When I think about the riches accumulated by the Medici and other Florentine fortunes, the first image that comes to mind isn’t a work in the Uffizi, the David, the Baptistery doors, or a statue in the Bargello. It’s of a dusty, forlorn set of rooms that once occupied a top corner of the Pitti Palace. Long since gutted for exhibition space, they were once a repository for decorative objects acquired by this Smaug-like family.
If these ornate, intricate, and priceless objects could be so unimportant within their collections to be relegated here, I thought, how rich were these people?! My favorite item was actually a simple one—a set of parasol handles and caps for the tips carved from different shades of coral that you could swap out depending on your outfit. I also found it sad that the masters who spent their lives perfecting these treasures were largely forgotten. When artisan turned to artist for painters and sculptors, other crafts didn’t make the cut.
How I respond to art is often a combination of marveling at the level of difficulty an artist faced to pull something off as well as whether I would want it adorning my own house. (It’s also why I fully admit so much of contemporary art, which gleefully stomps on those values, whizzes right past me.) It’s why I had to be dragged out of the Green Vault in Dresden, with its dazzling collection of enamels, silver, amber, vessels, and ivories.
And it’s why this summer I was so excited to finally poke my head into Harvard’s Museum of Natural History and wander its collection of jaw-drop-inducing glass flowers produced by the Bohemian father-son duo of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. (Keep in mind for all these photos. These are hand-made glass!)
“It’s not uncommon for someone to come into the glass flowers exhibit and say, ‘Where are the glass flowers?’ It’s kind of like a daily occurance,” explains Jennifer Brown, the Collection Manager, when I interviewed her.
For the unfamiliar, that’s because the hundreds of glass models the Blaschkas made over decades at the turn of the century are often so true-to-life as to render a viewer incredulous they’re not real. In fact, much to the annoyance of the Blaschkas, it led to longstanding rumors that continue to this day about a secret formula or magic that allowed them to create these works.
The Blaschkas were glassmakers whose origins in the industry dated back to 15th-century Venice. During a trip to the U.S. in 1853, the father Leonard’s ship was becalmed off the Azores. Stuck, he began to draw jellyfish and other invertebrates he saw while the ship idled. He sketched them incessantly, the story goes, and grew preoccupied by their similarity to glass. When he returned, he began to make glass models of plants and invertebrates using traditional lampworking techniques.
His son Rudolf joined him upon turning 13 and they left behind the traditional business of glass eyes (for humans and taxidermists), jewelry, and labware. They drew the attention of noblemen and institutions across the western world. It was an era, after all, obsessed with the documentation and representation of nature. It made titans of men like Humboldt and Haeckel whose influence ran so deep they were a foundation for Art Nouveau artists like Mucha, Horta, Tiffany, and Guimard.
But the Blaschkas had also stumbled on something special. Before them, invertebrates were frustratingly difficult to display. They were often put in alcohol solutions where they would slowly lose their shape and thus their educational purpose. And dried and pressed plants lost not only their vibrancy but also the ability to examine them in three dimensions.
Those first glass flowers eventually made their way to a museum in Brussels that tragically burned down, but the roughly 10,000 glass-model invertebrates the pair forged using lamp-working techniques can be found in museums and collections around the world today.
However, the only place you can find their botanical works of art today is Harvard. At the time, Harvard was building a botanical museum, and glass botanical specimens with the potential to both wow and educate were perfect.
The collection is housed in glass cases in a special room at the museum, which has other chambers filled with the sort of typical items you’d expect. It was last renovated in 2016, a process which gave the display a heavier focus on botanical information. You can wander and just merely ooh and aah, or if you lean more scientific, you can, well, learn. (I wandered through marveling first, and then came back to plants that grabbed my eye.) I won’t waste precious newsletter space describing the models in detail–like the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal, they must be seen to be believed.
Thanks largely to the endowment of Mary Lee Ware, the Blaschkas produced 4,300 models of roughly 780 plant species exclusively for Harvard over a period of 50 years.1 The small details—some of which can only be seen under magnification—were made both with the glass itself and hand-painted.
In 1894, a botanist named Walter Deane took on the task of measuring their accuracy. In the Botanical Gazette, he wrote: “The eye is at first attracted by the great beauty of the flowers, as they lie on their white cards in the glass cases... on a closer examination, we are more and more surprised and delighted to find nature so accurately followed.”
Mere accuracy, though, isn’t what makes the flowers so remarkable. They are pieces of art, and part of a tradition as old as man that finds pleasure in pushing skill and imagination into depicting the natural world around us.2
The museum can be found on Harvard’s campus and is open seven days a week from 9-5. $15 for adults, $13 for seniors, $10 for youths, free for under three.
There is a semi-recurring competition for glasswork inspired by the Blaschkas, which can be seen here.
DEPARTMENT OF GRIEVANCES
I often worry that the travel press is too credulous, too ready to hype up everything new. I strongly disliked La Fantaisie in Paris, which is personal, but remain bewildered at the glowing coverage given how much they are charging a night. I was especially shocked, for instance, to see the Fontainebleau Las Vegas in TIME’s list of the greatest places in the world for 2024. We covered its disastrous opening and rollout at The Messenger (sadly all Messenger stories are gone), so it’s wild to see it there. I missed that the Hard Rock Hotel in the former Nazi bunker in Hamburg finally opened last month.
I pinged a dear friend with exceptional taste who lives there for some scuttlebut:
“The actual ‘roof garden’ is a 4x4 meter patch of poorly watered grass. The rest is green painted concrete. The hotel looks like the VIP lounge of a sports area. The view is quite nice … it’s total crap.”
I then showed that it also has been selected as one of the Greatest Places in the World by TIME for 2024.
“If that’s an exciting thing in this city, then Hamburg is doomed,” he replied. “That cannot be real. It must be a mockery.”
A couple weeks ago my former colleague Barbie Nadeau wrote this piece for CNN detailing all the ways Italy is fighting to control the effects of overtourism in summer. In the piece she writes:
The island of Capri will be taking a cue from a tourism entrance fee introduced by Venice earlier this year. It’s charging double its usual landing fee for arrivals over the busy holiday weekend.
I now am of the mind that alongside discounts or free admission for locals, Instagram-type destinations in Europe should just charge what they think are wild sums to Americans. Chances are, we’ll still think it’s a good deal and they’ll bring in a lot more money, and if not, there will be less crowding.
Never thought I’d feel sorry for a nightclub king opening something in an historic inn, but at least from reading this one story in the Wall Street Journal, it does seem like East Hampton was never going to welcome Zero Bond impresario Scott Sartiano with open arms. Like, this detail is just hilarious:
On the opening night of friends and family weekend, a village building inspector arrived, sending guests out of their seats mid-meal, from the large outdoor dining area to the restaurant’s indoor tables because of the potential hazards of a floral installation. (What Sartiano considers a $35,000 sculpture by a popular local artist, the authorities saw as a jumble of fake flowers that couldn’t be proven to be flame retardant. Sartiano removed it.)
I was very much one of those people who rolled my eyes when the seatbelt sign would be put on while flying and then we’d barely hit any turbulence. But I think given the spate of turbulence-related incidents lately (after years of warning that turbulence would get worse with climate change) I think we’re all better off just staying seated and those belts on. The latest came this week on a flight to London that left two people injured.
I’ve never really pulled the trigger on building loyalty with a hotel group. The cards always seemed meh in their benefits, and the process convoluted and better designed for people that love gaming rewards stuff out. So it grabbed my attention in this must-read piece about how hotel loyalty programs have degraded their values lately that Hyatt has stuck with clear and easy to use charts for rewards. “What I hear from members is that simplicity gives them confidence and comfort,” Amy Weinberg, Hyatt’s senior vice president of brand, loyalty and data says in the piece. So, props to Hyatt, and Hotels.com maybe take notice and go back to the old program!
Lastly, this piece about using alternate airports is so unserious. As a general rule, unless you’re a student or student-budget-adjacent, all the budget gimmicks with cheaper flights to far airports cost you either just as much money in the end or cost you a painful amount in other ways like time, energy, and comfort. That said, just practically, some of this stuff is laughable. San Bernardino Airport instead of LAX? Even the piece notes it’s 60 miles from LA. New York Stewart as an alternate for NYC? Also 60 miles. And I would never classify Palm Beach International or T.F. Green as thaaaaat small of airports–T.F. green over the last decade served anywhere from 3-5 million people a year, just shy of Burbank. And if your headline is “Want to Feel Like You’re Flying Private? Ditch the Crowded Hubs for These Small Airports” how do you not mention JSX once in the piece?
TRAVEL INDUSTRY NEWS
Japanese town quietly removes its Mount Fuji-blocking barrier (It said it worked, no more tourists)
The Taliban say they want to increase tourism to Afghanistan
DOJ declines to block Hawaiian-Alaska merger
Southwest is surveying customers about how much they care about free checked bags
Japanese tourism to Hawaii is only a third of what it was pre-pandemic
Delta’s chief operating officer is taking off
Leonard died in 1895, Rudolf continued until shortly before his death in 1939.
I was once at a dinner in Spain and one of the attendees was an academic specializing in art. I had spent that morning at the Sorolla Museum and I proceeded to gush about a handful of the paintings that captivated me. My verbal incontinence at an end, the man paused, and then in a cascade of condescension, sneeringly swept away my enthusiasm for “representational painting” which merely seeks to imitate what we see. Experienced with Spaniards and academics, I held my tongue. I wish I could have shown him these flowers as a counterargument.