The Wild Turkeys of Schleswig
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There are eight American turkeys painted on the walls of Schleswig's Cathedral of St Peter - which is odd... since the frescoes were created two centuries before Columbus even crossed the Atlantic.
How did the creatures come to be added to the medieval Biblical scene? Was this proof that the Germans reached the Americas before Columbus? Or do the painted birds tell a different story all together?
For a full list of sources used in this episode visit Tim Harford.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin |
| 0:13.0 | For a charming little town, Schleswig in Germany has a magnificent old cathedral. |
| 0:18.0 | Parts of the Cathedral of St. Peter date back nearly 900 years |
| 0:23.0 | and King Frederick I of Denmark is buried there. |
| 0:27.0 | Decade after decade, century after century, new parts were added to the building, the new artwork. |
| 0:34.0 | Late in the 1800s, Schleswig became the regional capital and work began on the restoration of the cathedral's great Gothic frescoes. |
| 0:45.0 | These pictures were painted on the walls of the cathedral cloisters. They were glorious. |
| 0:51.0 | They were fading, flaking, being corroded by six centuries of dam. |
| 0:58.0 | And so the Cathedral commissioned a painter, August Olbers, to restore the great medieval paintings. |
| 1:05.0 | His work began in 1888 and it was widely admired for its beauty and clarity. |
| 1:12.0 | Five decades passed and tastes changed as tastes do. |
| 1:18.0 | In 1937, the church authorities decided that August Olbers had done a terrible job. He'd added too much. |
| 1:28.0 | Repainting rather than carefully revealing and conserving what was there. |
| 1:33.0 | The new conventional wisdom was that a modern restoreer shouldn't add anything to the original work. |
| 1:40.0 | And in particular, shouldn't fill in the blanks where the original work had disappeared in patches. |
| 1:46.0 | Olbers had done all that. It was agreed that his work must be removed and the original medieval art, even if incomplete or damaged, must be revealed. |
| 1:59.0 | And so, three men began the second attempt at restoration. |
| 2:04.0 | In charge was Professor Ernst Fey, a noted art restoreer and a widely admired historian of art. |
| 2:13.0 | Assisting him was Dietrich Fey, his son. And at the bottom of the pyramid, assisting them both, was a young painter by the name of Lothar Malskatt. |
| 2:25.0 | Fey, Fey and Malskatt worked diligently for months, protecting the artwork with scaffolds and tarpaulin, until finally revealing the restored work in all its glory. |
| 2:39.0 | Critics were astounded and delighted. The paintings may have dated all the way back to the year 1300 or even earlier, but under the sensitive guidance of Professor Fey, |
| 2:51.0 | they'd been restored so beautifully that they might have been painted yesterday. |
... |
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