Those drawings - with the red "ground" behind the carvings - are new to me. It seems that quite a bit of good, up-to-date artwork is being created in conjunction with the current conservation project. It seems that some of the preservation techniques and chemicals that were applied to the ship right after she was raised, back in the late fifties/early sixties, have broken down since then. Some of the biggest names in the conservation field are working on the problem, and conservators from all over the world have been turning up in Stockholm to help. (Two faculty members and two grad students from the joint where I work just got back from there.) One happy result of all this is that the Swedish government (which is supremely aware of what an important source of tourist dollars the ship is) has been spending money on her rather lavishly. The money is going not only to the actual conservation effort, but to a series of excellent publications. As I understand it, the plan is to publish a series of four major books about the Wasa. The first volume is in print now; I got a copy of it for Christmas a couple of years ago. (Maybe Vol. II is out, but if so I haven't seen it.) Vol. I is spectacular - one of the best such publications I've seen. The only problem is that it's a little frustrating: it contains several sheets of well-drawn, folded plans, but only a fraction of the full set that, presumably, will be published with all four volumes. (Guess they want us to buy all four.) I have no idea how long we'll have to wait for the full set, but such projects have an irritating way of taking longer than anybody predicted. In the mean time, here's a not-bad website with some decent pictures on it: http://www.vasamuseet.se/sitecore/content/Vasamuseet/InEnglish/About.aspx That color shot of the gun (click on "History," then on "Built for Battle") gives, I suspect, a pretty good idea of what it would have looked like when it was new. Shiny, but not "brass" colored in the traditional sense - rather a dull, dark, highly-polished brown with a metallic cast to it. (That word "bronze" apparently covered a lot of somewhat different metals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) |