Talk:Poniatowski gems

A fact from Poniatowski gems appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 30 July 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the Poniatowski gems, 19th-century forgeries of ancient engraved gems, have themselves been copied by other forgers?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2023/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Poniatowski gem.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Lightburst (talk) 18:49, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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Article history

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... that the Poniatowski gems, 19th-century forgeries of ancient engraved gems, have themselves been copied by other forgers? Source: Two such copies are documented by Gołyźniak, Paweł (December 2016), "The Impact of the Poniatowski Gems on Later Gem Engraving", Studies in Ancient Art and Civilisation, 20: 173–192, doi:10.12797/saac.20.2016.20.11
- Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Quintin Johnstone

Created by David Eppstein (talk). Self-nominated at 23:36, 22 July 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Poniatowski gem; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.[reply]

General eligibility:
New enough:
Long enough:
Other problems: - NA

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

QPQ: Done.

Overall:

All good here: an interesting hook and a good article put together very rapidly indeed. Hook is cited and checks out. Nice work. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 10:25, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Images

@David Eppstein you can look through Prendeville if you want to find images (monochromatic photographs from 1850s). If you find one you like I'm happy to crop, color adjust, and add to commons. But we could also try to look around for full-color photos; there may be some available under open licenses. –jacobolus (t) 02:28, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think the current top image probably comes from https://www.carc.ox.ac.uk/xdb/asp/gemsSearch.asp and might not actually be freely licensed. –jacobolus (t) 02:43, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I tried messaging Tom Swolpe of this blog to see if he has any images we can freely use, or if he has advice where to find some. –jacobolus (t) 03:07, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Okay I added an image from the Met. They have several gems, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?department=12&q=poniatowski and claim the photographs of them are in the public domain. –jacobolus (t) 04:34, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Including a full-color image is a good choice. Pairing it as you did with a plaster cast is also a good choice as it shows the reversal resulting from that process. However there is a big big problem with your choice of images. They are of a stone described by the Met as "a fake...similar in style" to the Poniatowski gems. They do not appear to be actual Poniatowski gems. I have removed them for this reason. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:13, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@David Eppstein I think by "fake" what they mean here is that they are not actually from antiquity. I agree the page is confusing. The Met's page directly says "Provenance: Prince Stanislas Poniatowski ; [ Poniatowski sale, Christie's, London , 1839 ] ; John Tyrrell (1839–ca. 1859) ; Cele H. and William B. Rubin (until 1961; to MMA)". I haven't checked but I believe it is the same for the others. –jacobolus (t) 06:56, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Met descriptions for their catalog descriptions clearly distinguish between two whose descriptions begin "Prince Poniatowski's collection" and seven whose descriptions begin "a fake, one of six in the Museum's collection, similar in style to those supplied by Italian Neoclassical engravers to Prince Stanislaw Poniatowski". Despite their inability to count, the seven clearly indicate that the Met curators do not believe these to be Poniatowski gems. We should go with what that source clearly state and not with our own impressions of what they might be. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:02, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The page at the Met directly claims the provenance is "Poniatowski -> Christie's -> Tyrrell -> Rubin & Rubin -> MMA". Seems pretty clear to me. Maybe you can write them an email to ask. –jacobolus (t) 07:04, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah they all list provenance from Poniatowski, Christie's, etc., and if you looked I imagine you could find them all in the CARC database, in the old catalogs, etc. Looks like there was some miscommunication and whoever wrote the little intro blurb at the Met made a mistake. –jacobolus (t) 07:00, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That is original research. The existence of similar objects in catalogs is not definitive given the evidence we already have in other sources for some of the objects taken as Poniatowkski jewels actually being copies rather than original Poniatowski jewels. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:03, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The CARC catalog shows literally the same photograph. This is not "original research". This is carefully quoting probably the most reliable source about this topic in the world. –jacobolus (t) 07:04, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Met description pages distinguish between two sets of objects. Why should we not quote exactly the wording of the Met description pages, as my preferred version, instead of concluding based on reasoning rather than sourcing that the Met must be somehow incorrect? What is the harm in doing that? Or, to put it another way: the people who write these description pages are professional experts in the provenance of works of art. We are not. We should follow their expertise rather than pretending to expertise that we do not ourselves have. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:08, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The previous image you keep replacing this with does not have any kind of copyright indicated, and is neither more nor less reliable in provenance (both can be found at the CARC catalog, where their metadata is not distinguishable in any meaningful way).

If you want a different image because you are confused about this one go do the work to put a better one up yourself, instead of edit warring here. –jacobolus (t) 07:11, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What do you take the Met curators to mean when they claim the provenance of this specific object is "Poniatowski -> Christie's -> Tyrrell -> Rubin & Rubin -> MMA"? –jacobolus (t) 07:12, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I sent a message to the met curators through a form on their website. We'll see if it ever gets a reply. I might try emailing the CARC people as well. –jacobolus (t) 07:30, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@David Eppstein Here's what collector Tom Swope says about the Met gems in question, via email: The Met has not caught up with the times, and still subscribes to the idea that the Poniatowski collection was all fakes, rather than as modern inventions based on antiquity. They were fakes in that they were presented by the Prince as ancient, and only later, decades after this death was it determined they were not. It destroyed the market for ancient gems and sowed doubt, thus a very low opinion is held of the neo-Classical gems. ¶ So do post the gem from the Met, it is a fake ancient gem but a real Poniatowski, if that makes sense. ¶ We don’t know who carved which gem, thus their non specific attribution. I'll report back if I get a response from the Met or CARC. –jacobolus (t) 21:03, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

more sources

Parking sources here to investigate / possibly cite. –jacobolus (t) 05:51, 24 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wagner, Claudia (2013), "Fable and history: Prince Poniatowski's Neoclassical gem collection", in Wiegel, Hildegard; Vickers, Michael (eds.), Excalibur: Essays on Antiquity and the History of Collecting in Honour of Arthur MacGregor, BAR Publishing, pp. 145–150, doi:10.30861/9781407311302

splitting references

@User:David Eppstein: It's hard to answer questions you put into commit messages unless you are asking to be reverted. It reads kind of passive-aggressive (and the SHOUTING commit messages previously are more like just aggressive).

I am happy to answer your question though, "what is the purpose of having three different formats for citations, one of them deprecated??"

The purpose was to split some of the best references out into a separate section at the bottom, because readers often just skim down to the bottom of a Wikipedia article to look for good secondary sources. If we can separate some of the best summaries, it makes it easier for them to get a good (non-Wikipedia) overview and/or deep dive into the topic. Many references buried in the footnotes are useful for verifying some specific trivial claims in the article, but aren't that useful or interesting otherwise.

The purpose of using the "harvard" style references is that these are links to primary-source catalogs that are not really being treated as "references" per se, but more like subjects of the article. –jacobolus (t) 07:44, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Harvard-style in-text references are deprecated. And splitting some references out of the footnotes and formatting them a different way is just a violation of WP:CITEVAR. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:25, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The whole "deprecated" thing was stupid, a poorly conceived change pushed through quickly without consensus by a small group of editors who didn't like it. But in any event, the alternative in this case would be writing down the same information [name and year] inline but not linking it, then putting a footnote with the link (note, not metadata about the catalog in question directly in the footnote, but a secondary link referencing that metadata, because those are in their own section)... which seems pretty pointless if we can just put the link directly. I don't think our use here has anything to do with the "deprecation" either way. –jacobolus (t) 17:11, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Instead of focusing on weird rules lawyering, let's focus on what is best for readers, which is a much more important concern. A direct question: do you think it's ever valuable to split some of the better references into a separate section, apart from the indiscriminate mass of other footnotes? You personally have advocated for this solution in very similar situations in the past. What's different about this article? –jacobolus (t) 17:15, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What's different is the purpose of the splitting. It is sometimes reasonable to have a mix of long and short footnotes with a later references section, for the purpose of allowing the short footnotes to specify different page numbers within long (book length) sources (and avoiding abominations like {{rp}}). It is not reasonable to have a mix of long and short footnotes when there is only one short footnote per long later reference and there is no rhyme or reason to which references are short+later and which are long-in-footnotes. That way is just gratuitous inconsistency. You might think that your purpose was to highlight some of the references as particularly helpful to readers but that's not the purpose of references and that purpose was completely non-obvious. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:04, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. Perhaps I'll (at some point later) pull all of the frequently-cited articles and add some explicit page numbers then. –jacobolus (t) 19:01, 25 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]