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Art · Museums · People · Rome
Jan Gossaert's 1508 journey to Rome and his four surviving Roman drawings
The outstanding Netherlandish painter and draughtsman of the 15th and 16th centuries Jan Gossaert, also known as Mabuse or Johannes Malbodius, travelled to Rome in the autumn of 1508 in the retinue of Philip of Burgundy. Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, had sent Philip as ambassador to Pope
NB! · Faith · Observations · Heritage · Society
Vandalism in Venice
Vandalism in Venice. The damage done to a sacred aedicule with an image of the Virgin Mary, not far from the Papadopoli Hotel, is the thanks of Christian Europe from the hordes of Afro-Arab "doctors and engineers". The Reconquista is inevitable
Listings · Moscow · Coming Up · Art · Cinema · Museums
This week's five exhibitions on time, and on how the living and the man-made deceive it
This week's five exhibitions are about time, and about how the living and the man-made deceive it. There is an artistic dynasty across four generations, newsreel film that stopped the moment, the faces of the theatre, deception as an engine of evolution and, to make up the
Science · Palaeontology · Nature · Humour
Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates
Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates. The first myriapods appeared some 460 million years ago. That is 35 million years earlier than the oldest known myriapod fossils. In the world onto which they crawled, or
Archaeology · Geography · Ethnography
Early medieval grave of a woman with a newborn and a horse, discovered in 2014
This is a gilded bronze earring from a tenth-century burial investigated by an expedition of the Academy of Sciences in the Sayan Mountains of southern Siberia. The grave, discovered as long ago as 2014 during preparations for the building of a railway, contained the remains of a woman, a
Archaeology · Science · Nature
Seed analysis shows Etruscans at Cetamura grew one white grape clone for centuries
It turns out the Etruscans cloned a single grape variety for centuries. And it was white. In Chianti, at the Etruscan-Roman site of Cetamura, researchers studied grape pips from the bottoms of wells cut into the rock. They found that most of the pips in the study date from
Archaeology · Science · Ethnography
A team of researchers at Yale University has established that the earliest populations of Near Oceania interbred with at least three distinct groups related to the Denisovans
A team of researchers at Yale University has established that the earliest populations of Near Oceania interbred with at least three distinct groups related to the Denisovans. The conclusion rests on an analysis of the genomes of 177 people from 12 populations in Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and
Museums · Heritage · Society
Court of Appeal in Rio de Janeiro orders former director of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro Fabio Szwarcwald to pay the museum 100,000 reais for disclosing that it had gone 16 years without fire insurance
Szwarcwald ran the museum from 2020 to 2022 and left soon after his public statement. Insurance and other major expenditure are the responsibility of the museum's board, so this is in effect a story of a confrontation between a salaried director, who had embarked on modernisation, and his
Architecture · Faith · Heritage
Catholic rights from the Batavian Republic to constitutional reform and the De Duif church
The golden dove on the neo-Baroque façade of Amsterdam's De Duif church recalls the seventeenth century, when a clandestine Catholic congregation, Het Vrededuifje, the "Little Dove of Peace", stood on the site of this church. When all religions were formally put on an equal footing
Archive · London · Monarchies · Society
Norman French in the Royal Assent Formula of British Acts of Parliament
I cannot find a good-quality photograph of this act, but the document is very famous. And it begins with the following words: Le Roy le Veult soit baillé aux Seigneurs. A cette Bille avecque des amendemens les Seigneurs sont assentuz. A ces Amendemens les Communes sont assentuz. And no,
London · Observations · Society
Bilingual Royal Mail website and the legal status of Welsh in the United Kingdom
I noticed that the website of Royal Mail, the state post of the United Kingdom, works in two languages, English and Cymraeg, that is, Welsh. One wonders why only two, and why precisely these two? The United Kingdom has, in fact, no constitutionally enshrined state language. The status of English