by Colin Dickey
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.”200 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.”201
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.
“THE 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.”202 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!203
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?”204
His words touched a nerve, and a month later the money was appropriated for a granite monument—decorated with images representing the four faculties of learning: an owl for philosophy, a snake for medicine, scales for law, and a cherub for theology— to house Swedenborg’s remains. Much was made of the Swedish granite from Gylsboda and Vånga, as if to reflect the very Swedish origins of the dust and bone inside. Nyström’s words echo something of what Adolfo Frederick had said to Nicholas II about Haydn so many years earlier: “How fortunate was the man who employed this Haydn in his lifetime and now possesses his mortal remains.” To own the remains of a great artist or genius, it would seem, is to own that man’s legacy as well. In the twentieth century it was not the phrenologists or even the museums who owned these heads, but their countries of origin.
THE REPATRIATION OF Swedenborg’s remains in 1908 received a great deal of attention, not just in the Swedish press but also in the English papers. Given the still relatively small following he had, it seems odd that so much ink was devoted to it. Perhaps it was the singularity of the event, the easy cooperation between two countries at a time when national alliances were increasingly fraught, or the pomp and reverence it received, but the repatriation made all the papers. And none of the newspapers could avoid making comparisons between this exhumation and the earlier, extralegal one that had separated Swedenborg’s head from his body for a half-dozen years. In July 1908 Notes and Queries ran a short note on the repatriation of the philosopher-scientist’s remains, including a short reference to the matter of his skull.205 Just above it, completely unrelated, was a short notice about some odd riddles a certain scholar used to put to grammarians, such as “Who was Hecuba’s mother? What name did Achilles assume among the virgins? What was it that the Sirens used to sing?” The scholar’s name was Sir Thomas Browne.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RIVAL SKULLS
After reading a newspaper description of the destroyer Fulgia and its precious cargo, a man named William Rutherford sat down and composed a quick letter, which he sent to the “Swedish Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary” on April 1.
Sir,
I have noticed with interest the announcements in the press that the remains of Emanuel Swedenborg are to be transferred from St. George’s in the East to Sweden.
Some forty years ago I knew a man in the East End of London who boasted of the possession of a human skull, said to have been taken from the broken coffin containing Swedenborg’s remains during some excavations of the old church.
I am not aware whether an examination of the remains is intended now, but it would interest me to know whether the man (generally a very veracious old gentleman) spoke the truth or not. The matter may also be of interest to the Swedish government, hence my main reason for calling your attention to the matter & my apology for addressing you.
I am, Sir,
Yours most obediently,
(signed) William Rutherford206
Rutherford’s letter was certainly odd—its randomness, his apologetic tone, the utter lack of particulars. It didn’t present much to go on other than a vague notion that he intended to label the head now in transit to Sweden as inauthentic. More out of cour
tesy than curiosity, the pastor of the Swedish Church wrote back. “We would,” he wrote, “of course, be very interested to know all particulars you may know of. Have you any idea where the skull which the old man talked about is now? When the coffin has been brought to Stockholm there may be an examination of the remains by an expert.”207 Rutherford’s reply came the next day.
Rev:d & Dear Sir,
Please accept my thanks for Your letter of yesterday.
It was early in the “seventies” that the skull was being exhibited, but doubtless it could be traced in case of need. Would it not be well, before taking any steps, to await the examination of the remains? If the coffin contains a skull & the experts accept it as authentic, there is no more to be said, but my impression is that the old antiquary in question did possess the one taken out of the coffin, i.e., the actual skull of Emanuel Swedenborg.
In any case I shall be glad to do what I can when occasion arises.
I am,
Rev-d & Dear Sir,
Yours truly,
(signed) W:m Rutherford208
Who was William Rutherford? What was his interest in Swedenborg, or his skull? His letter didn’t even mention that he had seen the skull, only that he had heard someone boasting of it forty years earlier. He certainly didn’t profess to be a member of the New Church himself.
Still, there had been enough rumors over the years about the skull’s authenticity that Rutherford’s letter was passed along to the Royal Academy of Science. In May, when Swedenborg arrived in his homeland, the academy decided to open the casket and examine the remains to settle the matter once and for all regarding the provenance of the skull.
THE TEAM OF scientists put in charge of the examination was made up of six members of the academy’s Faculty of Medicine, including Johan V. Hultkrantz, who took the lead. None of them were forensic specialists, but Hultkrantz’s research was incredibly thorough. Like Tandler, Hultkrantz knew there was no one test that would confirm the origin of the skull beyond a shadow of a doubt, so he subjected it to a battery of tests, hoping to build a solid case through the accumulation of circumstantial evidence.
Hultkrantz was meticulous throughout. First of all there was the cast that had been made of the skull in 1823, just before it had been reinterred. The skull and cast matched perfectly, and there could be no doubt whatsoever that it was the same head that Granholm had given to Wåhlin, which had been displayed in Tulk’s phrenological cabinet before going back into the vault.
Hultkrantz characterized it as a “well-shaped skull, of medium size,” and noted that there was no doubt that “the cranium in question is masculine and is that of a person of advanced years.” For the age, he relied on an examination of the sutures of the individual bones (which continue to grow closed over the course of one’s life) and the teeth to conclude that “the skull is that of man over 50 years of age, and in no wise in disagreement with the assumption of an age of 84 years.”209
The skull was not as decayed as the rest of the body, but this was only to be expected since it had been out of the crypt from 1816 to 1823 and thus not subject as long to damp air and other unfavorable conditions. Hultkrantz also found pieces of the jawbone which had not been extracted with the rest of the skull and thus were in the same condition as the rest of the body. The jaw fragments, he surmised, could be used to match the head with the rest of the body. He was able to fit them together without difficulty, shellacking them so as to re-form the jaw. “To enable me to judge of the matter more exactly,” he explained, “I made a reconstruction of the missing parts on a plaster cast of the fragment of the lower jaw. The modeling was done free handed and with the guidance of a number of lower jawbones of older individuals from the collections of the Anatomical Museum.” Based on his reconstruction, Hultkrantz found that the close match of the jaw and skull suggested that they had once belonged to the same individual. “When the reconstruction was completed it was found to fit together surprisingly well with the cranium, only a very slight correction in the position of the articular processes being necessary.”210
But Hultkrantz wanted to go beyond this; he did his best to achieve absolute certainty, to make sure that the head could only be Swedenborg’s. He consulted the collection of “108 male crania” from “old burial places” around Uppsala, which dated from the eighteenth century and thus were likely contemporaries of Swedenborg, to make sure that the skull in question conformed to prevailing anthropological trends—it did. He then estimated that the brain would have been between 1,350 and 1,450 grams, keeping within the average of 1,400 grams for European males. “This appears,” he wrote, “perhaps, at first glance, to diminish the probability of the cranium in question having been Swedenborg’s,” since a genius’s brain could be expected to greatly exceed the average. But Hultkrantz—quite rightly—dismissed this question immediately. While explaining that it was “not the place for an exhaustive critical review of the theory regarding dependence of intelligence upon brain-volume,” he did point out that “strong protests have been made against such hasty conclusions, which neither rest on sufficiently comprehensive material nor have been arrived at with the proper criticism and necessary regard to sources of error, which are in such investigations just as difficult to avoid as they are easy to point out.”211 That Hultkrantz spent so little time on this question suggests its fading importance, and as the twentieth century progressed the argument that intelligence did not strictly correlate to brain volume would become more and more obvious and accepted.
Hultkrantz’s description of his work runs close to a hundred pages, indicating the range of tests to which he subjected the skull. He next made a bust of the philosopher, using the skull as a basis, to see whether or not, in a rough sense, the skull could hold a reasonable facsimile of Swedenborg. “The purpose of the reconstruction was not the production of an artistic piece of sculpture,” he felt the need to disclaim, “but only to scientifically test whether the man whose cranium was the basis for the bust could have had an appearance which agreed in its essential characters with Swedenborg’s, as we know him from his portraits.”212
He did not have a death mask of Swedenborg, so to match the skull to the head he had to rely on portraits. Like Browne, Swedenborg had had a relatively low forehead, and various painters had felt the need to correct this supposed defect in their portraits of him, resorting to a fair amount of “poetica licencia” when it came to his forehead and other elements of the face. “According to the esthetic conceptions of former times,” Hultkrantz noted, “the Greek nose was supposed to give the impression of ‘freedom from the passions,’ of ‘equilibrium between intelligence and sensuality,’ traits of character which an artist might well desire to introduce into his likeness of Swedenborg.”213 Hultkrantz, unlike many who had come before him, recognized these ideas as so much nonsense and was unfortunately forced to compensate with his own studies. He saw that he could rely on the portraits only to a limited extent and that any divergences between the skull’s forehead and the one depicted in the paintings meant not that the skull didn’t fit but rather that the paintings were to be distrusted.
To map the skull onto the portraits, he placed a transparency of the painting over a camera lens, then lined up the skull on the other end so that the lines of the skull showed through the painting. The images he produced offer a strange memento mori: a ghostly image of a skull creeping through from beneath the stately visage of the philosopher. Hultkrantz’s bust of Swedenborg may not have had an artistic goal, but the superimposition of the skull on the portraits echoes a fundamental theme that has long obsessed artists—the presence of death in the full flowering of life. “Et in Arcadia ego,” the skull in Guernico’s painting famously told the two young shepherds: “Even in idyllic Arcadia I exist.” Behind every proud portrait and testament to human genius, find this skull.
Portrait of Emanuel Swedenborg superimposed on Swedenborg’s skull, by Johann V. Hultkrantz
After such exhaustive study, Hultkrantz fe
lt confident of his conclusion. Having dispensed with the faulty methods of the last century and all its ideological biases, Hultkrantz produced a rigorous and thorough analysis of the head of Emanuel Swedenborg, but even so, he did not want to rule out other possibilities.
In the preceding pages I have already pointed out the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of arriving, in a question of this sort, at an absolutely infallible result in a positive direction. To prove that a given cranium cannot be that of a specified person may at times be a relatively easy task, while the demonstration of the true identity of a skull must be, almost without exception, limited to a calculation of probabilities, a proving that there exist no invalidating reasons, and a collecting of a number of arguments, each of which by itself has only a rather modest value as proof, but all of which, when taken together, by their number and unanimity, carry conviction to the mind.
This was the best that could be hoped for when it came to the authenticating of a disputed head. But for Hultkrantz it was enough—by way of conclusion he pronounced that the skull “which now lies in Emanuel Swedenborg’s coffin may, with the greatest degree of probability, be regarded as genuine.”214
THIS ENTIRE UNDERTAKING had been brought about by William Rutherford’s letters, and Hultkrantz had felt obliged to address him; he didn’t conclude that Rutherford’s recollection was wrong, per se—it may very well have been the case that an antiquarian had told Rutherford he had Swedenborg’s skull and may even have believed it himself. But based on the apparent authenticity of the skull now in Sweden, it appeared “much more probable,” Hultkrantz concluded, “that the grave-digger had deluded the old antiquary into buying a false skull.”215