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

Observations · Heritage · Society

Yet Another Absurd Piece of News

Yet another absurd piece of news. The restoration of monuments is being removed from independent expert review. On 12 June a law was signed that, from 1 March 2027, changes the procedure for work on cultural heritage sites. Amendments to Federal Law No. 73-FZ and to the Town Planning

Coming Up · Museums · Observations · Heritage · Pop Culture · Rome

Fendi to show Maria Grazia Chiuri's couture at Rome's GNAM gallery on 9 July

On 9 July Fendi will show its first couture collection by Maria Grazia Chiuri, who moved from Dior last October. The venue is not Paris but Rome's National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the GNAM. The gallery building itself is a former seventeenth-century monastery of the

Architecture · Heritage · Saint Petersburg

Restoration of the Grand Antechamber at the House of Radio in Saint Petersburg Completed, Preserving Several Eras

At Saint Petersburg's House of Radio, the restoration of the grand antechamber has been completed. The method chosen here is rather unusual: not a return to a single era, but a combination of different historical layers: pre-revolutionary, Soviet, perestroika-era and contemporary. Coffered ceilings, Pompeian-style murals,

Art · Cinema · Heritage · New York · Society

Gustav Klimt painted "Portrait of Fräulein Lieser" in 1917 and had not finished it when he died in 1918

Gustav Klimt painted "Portrait of Fräulein Lieser" in 1917 and had not finished it when he died in 1918. The commission came from the wealthy Viennese Jewish Lieser family. For nearly a century the picture was known only from a black-and-white photograph of 1925: it vanished

Archaeology · Museums · Heritage

Theft of the Coțofenești gold helmet from a museum in Assen, its return and the sentencing

In January 2025 three robbers blew open a door of the Drents Museum in Assen in the Netherlands and made off with the golden helmet of Coțofenești and three bracelets. All the objects had been lent to the museum by Romania for the exhibition “Dacia: Empire of Gold and Silver”

London · Museums · Heritage · Society

The famous Bayeux Tapestry, created in the eleventh century for Bishop Odo, brother of William the Conqueror, will leave France for an exhibition at the British Museum

Historically, the tapestry (in essence a piece of linen embroidery almost 70 metres long) has been kept in the Norman town of Bayeux as a monument to the Norman conquest of England. The other day a French court permitted the temporary transportation of this fragile relic to Great Britain, despite

Architecture · Moscow · Observations · Heritage · Society

Well, Muscovites will long remember the architect Kuznetsov and other officials of the city administration with kind words, as they look at the gaps in the historic fabric of the centre, filled with highly valuable items of elite real estate

Well, Muscovites will long remember the architect Kuznetsov and other officials of the city administration with kind words, as they look at the gaps in the historic fabric of the centre, filled with highly valuable items of elite real estate. Take, for instance, the site of the former Baldina apartment

Archaeology · Heritage · Science

Radiocarbon dating places 43 helmets off Benicarló at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries

In 1990, off the coast of Benicarló, at the underwater site of Piedras de la Barbada in eastern Spain, 43 iron helmets were raised from a depth of six metres. For over thirty years they were held to be Roman, if only because helmets are a commonplace Roman find in

Archaeology · Geography · Heritage · Science

Chinese porcelain raised by robot from a sunken northern ship of the late Baroque era

In the Skagerrak off the coast of Norway, at a depth of some 600 metres, an eighteenth-century merchant ship has been found almost intact. Usually a shipwreck leaves behind little but potsherds, yet here whole stacks of well-preserved tableware lie on the seabed, and alongside the plates and

Archaeology · Art · Heritage · Science

Red stripes in Bacon Hole cave in Wales identified as rock art over 17,000 years old

In Bacon Hole Cave in South Wales, red horizontal bands have been recognised as a cave painting more than 17,000 years old. They were found as long ago as 1912, but in 1928 they were written off as a natural seepage of iron oxide, and for almost a century