Interior, looking toward altar:
Posted on 07/11/2004 12:25:26 PM PDT by blam
Medicis' secret crypt unearthed
John Hooper in Rome
Thursday July 8, 2004
The Guardian (UK)
A long-rumoured secret crypt of Italy's mighty Medici family was discovered by scientists yesterday after a hunt reminiscent of an Indiana Jones movie. The vaulted chamber was found under a stone floor behind the main altar of the Medici chapels in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. Under the gaze of sculptures by Michelangelo and his pupils, researchers lifted a stone slab to find seven steps leading down to the entrance. According to Italian media reports, the hidden crypt is between 2.1 metres (7ft) and 2.4 metres high and six metres by at least four metres wide.
Yesterday's discovery is the latest development in a remarkable project. Since last month, a team of paleopathologists from American and Italian universities have been digging up the bodies of 49 members of the Medici family buried in the church of San Lorenzo.
They aim to carry out tests to build a picture of the lives - and deaths - of a ruling elite that held power in Florence and much of Tuscany for more than three centuries.
On Tuesday researchers opened the tomb of the last of the dynasty, the grand duke Gian Gastone de' Medici - and were astonished to find it empty.
Gino Fornaciari, of Florence University, told the Ansa news agency: "Behind a first marble panel we expected to find a second stone slab. Instead, we found a wall."
In trying to locate the final resting place of Gian Gastone, who died in 1737, they stumbled on the secret crypt. The stone slab blocking the entrance to the stairs was found a few metres away from Gian Gastone's mysteriously empty tomb.
It was known that some of the Medici family's remains were moved from their original burial places in 1857. And, according to the early 20th-century British historian GF Young, the coffins of Gian Gastone and his grandfather had been moved to a secret crypt accessible only down hidden stairs. Until yesterday's discovery, his account had been dismissed as baseless rumour.
However, inside the crypt, there were another eight bodies, one of an adult and the remaining seven of children.
Most of the remains were in an advanced state of decomposition. But one of the children had been expertly embalmed and vestiges of clothing remained on the body.
The €400,000 (£267,000) exhumation project involves scientists from the universities of Florence, Pisa, New York, Long Island and Minnesota. Even before yesterday's sensa tion, it had yielded interesting results.
The researchers are already convinced that the family was not, as previously believed, afflicted with gout, but with a severe form of arthritis. Piero de' Medici, who ruled Florence from 1464 to 1469 and was known as Piero the Gouty, was so badly crippled that he was often able to use only his tongue.
Historians hope the project will help clear up some of the puzzles about the Medicis, including the death in 1589 of Prince Francesco I, who was said to have died of malaria but is long suspected to have been poisoned.
Interior, looking toward altar:
Even St. Peter's in Rome has been excavated--right under the altar.
bttfl
You apparently have been to Hattenheim, on the Mosell river.
The church ran out of space in the cemetary, so all the bones were dug up and moved to the church basement. Layered very neatly too, I might add. At the time I was there (45 years ago) it only cost 5 phennigs to go down and look.
Sorry! should have read: You apparently HAVEN'T been
One scarecely knows where to begin.
What you've posted is the church of S. Lorenzo. It's in the same complex as the Medici chapel, but in a different area.
For years Native American groups protested National Geographic over what they saw saw as the blasphemous desecration of their ancestral remains. It is only very recently that NG turned to being "PC" and returned the remains to tribal leaders.
This blantantly prurient abuse of the dead is disgusting. Mere grave-robbing, with an academic overlay to make it respectable. Whether Piero had arthritis or Francesco was poisoned is of no consequence today, especially compared to the decent expectation to which we're all entitled that our own graves will not be raided for profit one day. Especially in view of the loyalty the last of the Medici preserved for their ancestral home -- an affection that enriches them to this day -- the Florentine cooperation in this desecration stinks of ingratitude and contempt for heritage.
Like abortion, grave-robbing was once something done in secret because it was seen to be sordid: in our own day sacredness is denied alike to the lives of the living the bodies of the dead. What fine civilised people we are.
Exhumation for legitimate criminal or ecclesiastical investigation doesn't trouble me in the least. In the latter case especially, there's never any loss of reverence to the body because the exhumation takes place in the context of an adequate anthropology of what the body signifies. It's the purely secular research that's wrong because all of its premises about the nature of humanity are false.
A person's right to bodily inviolability survives his death. Consider the reasonable presumption that funereal rites reflect the expectations and wishes of the deceased. If we can see our way to defending a decedent's wishes in the matter of the disposal of his property with a fully developed jurisprudence, how can we then suggest that his burial wishes are of no consequence? Short of falling back on the argument that might makes right, I mean.
Please don't tell me that the jurisprudence of wills and successions exists only to impart order to a festival of booty on the part of the living. Any utilitarian theory such as this, designed to serve a social purpose, can be set aside when convenient to serve another social purpose later -- such as confiscatory esate taxes. Presumably most here would find that objectionable.
The only answer can be that wills and successions are a matter of natural law that recognises the rights even of the dead to have their wishes respected.
Of course I'm conflicted because I enjoy seeing archaeological artifacts as much as the next person. But grave goods are not sacred in any sense approaching that of the body itself. I'm vastly more interested in a decent respect, if reverence is too much to ask for, being paid to the corpse itself, than in his helmet or drinking cup or favorite hound. Of course I have no hope of this, as the dead left to their own devices are powerless in this power-worshippng world.
That sounds apocryphal to me.
Paper used to be made from linen rags before the invention of the wood pulp process. And the biggest source of linen rags was...like you said.
Same reason I knocked the nose of the Sphynx.
Because I can.
No, that's the wrong chapel. Your photo is of the old chapel, designed by Michelangelo, with the graves of Lorenzo the Magnificant and his brother Giuliano (if I recall). This article pertains to the new chapel, which is larger and far more ornate.
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