Cranioklepty (23 page)

The joke is that Orlando is, by virtue of Woolf's imagination, already immortal. But then again, so was Browne, whose time on earth continued to lengthen with each rebuffed entreaty from the church. In 1814 Sigismund Neukomm had placed a stone tablet above Haydn's grave with the inscription
“Non omnis moriar”—
“Not all of me shall die.” Hyrtl, also quoting Horace, had added another line referring to immortality to Mozart. The belief that one is made immortal through one's art is certainly as old as art itself. But for this bizarre handful of cases, a kind of immortality had been achieved literally as well as metaphorically.

T
HE BATTLE WAS
to go on, as Browne's fate lay in limbo. The march of scientific progress moved inextricably forward, with new advances and breakthroughs every day. Forlorn and forgotten, Browne's skull gathered dust as its uselessness became more
and more absolute. He was to receive his glass case, belatedly, in 1902, but the hospital museum allowed the tercentenary of his birth to come and go with no movement on his return.

One hundred years earlier Angelo Soliman's daughter had learned a bitter lesson as she had made endless entreaties to have her father's taxidermied remains removed from the emperor's wonder cabinet and finally buried. Entreaties to Christian virtue or common decency, she learned, inevitably fell on deaf ears, a lesson Pelham Burn gathered a century later. It is hard to relinquish something so precious, even if the relic is ultimately useless. With no higher authority to which to appeal, Browne's status had become an endless source of frustration for Burn and for others who continued their attempts to reclaim the great man's skull so that he might rest in peace.

But for every skull belonging to a great man like Browne, for whom the church and other learned men would fight, there were thousands of others—those of Peruvians, Eskimos, Egyptians, Mongolians—with no one to argue on their behalf. The cobbler's apprentice, dead by suicide after his crime had been discovered, or the young girl dead from meningitis at age nineteen, her luminous body cut apart on the autopsy slab, or the reformist guerilla executed by hanging—who would speak for them?

The relics of many lie, like the ruins of Pompey's, in all parts of the earth; and, when they arrive at your hands, these may seem to have wandered far, who, in a direct and meridian travel, have but few miles of known earth between yourself and the Pole.

• Sir Thomas Browne,
Urn Burial

Bones cannot travel by themselves—they need labels, they need identifying marks, and most of all they need stories. Medieval saints' relics were usually accompanied by a reliquary or other identifying feature—an inscription or an image that could testify to the owner or the power of the remains. The history of bones, transmitted through oral and written stories, is central to their significance. Especially when a saint's relic moved from one community to another, or when it was passed down from one generation to the next, the story attesting to its power mattered as much as—if not more than—the bone itself.

Increasingly this became an issue with the skulls of these great men as well; as generations passed and their collectors passed on, it wasn't always clear how authentic the skulls were. Saints were lucky enough to have reliquaries and narratives accompanying them, but when a skull was taken under deliberately obscure or illegal circumstances, it was likely to lack reliable documentation.

Such was the situation in which a group of French scientists found themselves in 1821 when a curious artifact came their way. Jacques Berzelius, a Swedish naturalist, had been working with Georges Cuvier in the Museum of Natural History in Paris since 1819 and had recently returned to Sweden. There he came across a notice in a newspaper concerning Rene Descartes's skull. The French philosopher and mathematician, founder of much of modern science and philosophy, had died in Sweden in 1650, and now, over 170 years later, it seemed that a rather disreputable entrepreneur in Sweden had bought the head of Cartesius at an auction, to be used as decoration in his casino.
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Fortunately Berzelius was able to buy back the skull, and he shipped it off to Cuvier and his colleagues in Paris for analysis. In May 1821 they met to consider whether the skull really belonged to Descartes. The rest of the philosopher's remains had been sent back to France in 1666 and had been celebrated as the relics of a secular saint during the French Revolution. So why had his skull now shown up in Sweden? And was it authentic?

It certainly claimed to be the skull of Descartes. On the forehead were a few lines written in Latin, which read:

This small skull once belonged to the great Cartesius,
The rest of his remains are hidden far away in the land of France,
But all around the circle of the globe his genius is praised,
And his spirit still rejoices in the sphere of heaven.

Not only that, the skull had inscribed on it a record of its travels through the years. The names Isaak Planström, Stiernman, Celsius, and Ahlgren could be made out written on various parts of the head. They seemed to speak of a chain of ownership through the years.

But as Cuvier's colleague Jean-Baptiste Delambre pointed out, what proof did these names offer? During the discussion surrounding the skull, Delambre asked his colleagues, “What proof have we from elsewhere regarding its authenticity? Some inscriptions, more or less effaced, that one makes out on the convexity, which are the names of the successive owners, with some dates and nothing more.”
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Delambre argued that there was no conclusive evidence that the skull belonged to Descartes, and certainly the words on the bone couldn't be taken as reliable testimony.

To complicate the matter, while this discussion was taking place one of Berzelius's colleagues wrote to tell him that there was a different skull, in Lund, Sweden, that was also believed to be Descartes's. In addition, a third candidate for Descartes's head was announced by a man named Johan Arckenholtz, who claimed that the French philosopher's head had been split in two— Arckenholtz had kept half, and the other half had ended up with another Swede named Hägerflycht. The longer Descartes had been dead, it seemed, the more heads he had managed to grow.

It took months to untangle the histories of the separate heads, and while the Planström skull was ultimately judged to be the
philosopher's actual head, there would never be anything like definitive proof. You could trace the owners, you could match the bone structure to known portraits, but beyond that you could only hope for the best. Even in the twentieth century, as forensic techniques became more and more advanced, there would never be anything like 100 percent certainty, particularly if anyone voiced any doubt about the provenance of a skull. And there was always doubt about skulls stolen under the cover of night.

The skulls stolen throughout the early nineteenth century now sat mostly in libraries and museums, some with inscriptions bearing the names of their owners. But who could say for sure where they had really come from? Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, Skull George Potter, Ludvig Granholm, even Gerhard von Breuning— they had all followed their quarries to the grave, as had those who had inherited the skulls. But as the chains of ownership grew longer and memories grew dimmer, questions about the skulls' origins became increasingly important.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, studies were carried out on the heads of both Haydn and Mozart. Both had been traveling through the world long enough that questions about their origins had become unavoidable. Besides, there was already a head supposed to be Haydn's buried with the rest of his remains—the one turned over by Rosenbaum in 1820. Both skulls couldn't belong to Haydn. And as for Mozart, well, any head that was picked out of a mass grave several years after the burial was bound to raise some suspicion.

Skull identification was far from an exact science. Prior to the development of DNA testing in the 1980s, there was no definitive means of matching a set of remains to its owner. One could perform any number of tests that involved matching the skull to known portraits and descriptions, but in the end it came down to educated guessing, such as when Julius Tandler published an exhaustive study of the Haydn skull in the Society for the Friends of Music's possession in 1909.
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He compared the bone structure of the skull to that evident in the available busts and portraits of Haydn as well as the death mask made of the composer. This last was the most reliable method, since it most closely mapped the form and contours of the skull at the time of death. Tandler found that the skull in the society's possession seemed much more genuine than the one currently entombed with the rest of Haydn's remains, given the available evidence. But in this conclusion he relied heavily on the testimony of Rosenbaum and Peter, which he attached to his own findings. Without this written record, his measurements—whatever their exactness—would not have held the same weight.

Mozart's skull had traveled a somewhat different route than the other skulls in Hyrtl's possession, the ones that had ended up in the Mütter Museum. After Joseph Hyrtl's death in 1894 the skull had changed hands a number of times, and, according to
Notes and Queries
, at least one attempt had been made to substitute another skull for Mozart's, “but the fraud was discovered; upon which, in some mysterious way, the spurious skull disappeared and the genuine one was restored to its place.”
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The skull still had the accompanying verse from Horace, verifying that it was the same one that Hyrtl had owned. But there was still no way of knowing if it was actually the composer's head— because it had been unearthed from a mass grave, doubts would linger for decades.

Even more unclear was the case of the painter Francisco Goya, which remains unsolved to this day. At the height of his career Goya had been appointed court painter to Charles IV in 1789 but had left Spain for Bordeaux after the ascension of Charles's reactionary son, Ferdinand VII, in 1813. Goya died in 1828, still estranged from his homeland, but as the politics of his own lifetime receded into the past he joined the ranks of Cervantes and Velázquez as a Spanish cultural treasure, which meant that his body ultimately had to return to Spanish soil. In 1901 the Spanish consul to France was tasked with repatriating the painter's remains, but upon exhumation he discovered a problem and immediately dispatched a telegram to Madrid: “Goya skeleton without a head. Please instruct me.”
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But the consul's telegram didn't tell the whole story. There was, in fact, a skull with the remains. It just wasn't clear whose
skull it was. What they found in the grave was not one but two almost complete sets of remains, lying together as if in an embrace, with only one skull between them. The two bodies dovetailed neatly into the head, as if it were a secret shared between them. There was no clear indication as to the identity of the other skeleton, how it had found its way into Goya's grave, or which of the two was the owner of the head.

Unsure what belonged to whom, the Spanish consul took both sets of remains back to Madrid and reburied everything in the church of San Antonio de la Florida. Upon further investigation, it seemed likely that the skull belonged to the second set of remains that had somehow found its way into Goya's grave. Perhaps the soil in the Bordeaux graveyard had settled in some uneven manner, or perhaps the grave robbers who had taken Goya's skull had inadvertently disturbed another grave in their haste to fill in the painter's plot.

“T
HE LITTLE GREEN
oasis known as Princes-square,” the
Times
reported on April 8, 1908, “in the desert of bricks and poverty lying between Whitechapel and the river, was the scene yesterday of a strange ceremony, the beginning of Emanuel Swedenborg's last journey to his first home.”
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Goya's remains went home because he had become a national symbol, and his countrymen felt he belonged with them. For Swedenborg, it
was his repatriation that in turn guaranteed his reputation as a Swedish national treasure. Having lain undisturbed since 1823, Swedenborg's remains were being moved because the Swedish Church was to be demolished. Two of Swedenborg's followers had approached the Swedish secretary of state to suggest that the remains might be moved to Sweden, a proposal that had also been made by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, which was in the process of publishing a new edition of the philosopher's works.

He was booked on the Swedish destroyer
Fulgia
for passage back to Sweden in what was hoped to be his final voyage. In Uppsala 3,500 schoolchildren were lined up along the road to witness the procession as it made its way to the church. Inside, a lavish service welcomed him home, and a chorus sang the following song:

So when late spring sings its song,
You call out from your grave to our youth
That in light and dark times
Think nobly and do great deeds!
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Swedenborg now had a new oak coffin to replace the disintegrated one that had held him in London, but there was immediately talk of providing something more suitable. A grand sarcophagus was proposed, but the government's finance committee balked at spending that much money on a private citizen.

But was he just a private citizen? In addition to his religious teachings, Swedenborg had been a pioneer in math and science, and many saw him as one of Sweden's great scientific leaders. In a 1909 Parliament meeting, the conservative John Fredrik Nyström began a campaign to appropriate Swedenborg as a national icon. The money for the sarcophagus could easily be raised by Swedenborgians abroad, he pointed out, but then “the memorial therefore primarily would honor a religious writer and not a scientist.” In addition, the money would be coming primarily from America and England, not from Swedenborg's home country. “Should the simple wooden coffin stand there,” Nyström offered plaintively, “and witness how Sweden values her great men's memories?”
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