In the Press · Art · Heritage
I wrote for Esquire about the adventures of a "Russian" Cranach, discovered in a heap of church junk in Kyiv, which travelled across the whole of Europe, paid a visit to Hermann Göring and finally settled in the collection of an American millionaire. The story involves Jewish antique
NB! · Art · Observations · Pop Culture
thanks to Vogue for the good pictures from the Dolce & Gabbana show; below: nineteenth-century fish earrings, a Schiaparelli brooch and the Dolce & Gabbana lobsters in real life. Polyvore, forgive me!
Art · Observations · Pop Culture
Slightly off topic, but today I came across gold earrings of 1870 with fish in aquariums, and it reminded me of the Dolce & Gabbana Spring 2017 ready-to-wear collection. That collection, too, had fishy motifs, as well as some very striking lobster earrings, which I saw yesterday on
NB! · Archive · Art · Monarchies
Richard II knights the Irish kings of Connacht, Ulster, Thomond and Leinster. In the first place, it is beautiful..
NB! · Archaeology · Faith · The East · Art
There is a theory that the Mithraic tauroctony was borrowed from the eschatological slaying of the bull in Zoroastrianism. In the bas-relief, a scorpion bites off the slain bull's penis
NB! · Archive · Art · Moscow · Museums · Heritage
The Tretyakov Gallery has preserved a Chagall autograph. In the photograph he is seen with Furtseva and, in all likelihood, her daughter Svetlana Petrovna
Art · Moscow · Museums · People
In 1973, the 86-year-old Marc Chagall visited the Soviet Union for the first time. The visit was arranged by the Minister of Culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, who had been introduced to the artist in Paris. At the Tretyakov Gallery there opened what contemporaries described as a modest exhibition of
NB! · Archive · Art · People
Today is the birthday of Marc Chagall. In the photograph he is with his wife, Valentina Georgievna Brodskaya, at his home in the south of France, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he would die in 1985 at the age of 97. On the wall: Red Roofs
NB! · Art · Nature · Rome · Humour
An incredibly detailed female leopard in giallo tigrato marble (the stone that adorns Santa Maria Maggiore). The cat has glass eyes 😍 And her two cubs live in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana
NB! · Art · Museums · Observations · Nature · Humour
I wonder what plant it is that Cranach's Adam in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has on his nether parts? It looks like an epiphyte, something like an orchid. It would be amusing: in that case it is Eve who has plucked the flower, and not the other
Art · Museums
Opening a new weekly column. Today we shall visit the foremost art museum of Vienna, the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History), whose holdings are made up of several royal collections: those of Archduke Leopold, Emperor Rudolf II and Prince Eugene of Savoy. The Italians and the Dutch are the
NB! · Art · Observations · Humour
Look what I have discovered in a seventeenth-century Family Portrait by the Dutchman Hercules Sanders. The golden section! The unattractiveness of the features diminishes from the infant onwards, reaching its minimum in the figure of the head of the family