Art · Museums
"Madonna with Cherubim" was long considered the work of Giovanni Bellini, until in 1885, during restoration, features characteristic of his chief rival, and incidentally his relative, Andrea Mantegna, came to light. What misled viewers was a softness uncharacteristic of Mantegna. Despite the established title, the Madonna and Child
Art · Moscow · Museums · Observations · Heritage
The silliest thing about this renaming is its poor timing. For when the Pushkin Museum was offered, as a gift, the greatest collection of contemporary art of the second half of the twentieth century, the collection of Peter Ludwig, the very reason for the refusal was the condition that the
The East · Architecture · Monarchies · Museums · Heritage
The facade of the Mshatta Umayyad Palace, located in Jordan, presented in 1903 by Sultan Abdul Hamid II to the German Emperor Wilhelm II as a personal gift. The palace dates from the first half of the 8th century and is believed to have been built before the fall of
Coming Up · Faith · Art · Museums · Society · Paris
A triptych by the Belgian Symbolist Léon Frédéric entitled "The Ages of the Worker", painted between 1895 and 1897. It belongs to the collection of the Musée d'Orsay and is currently on show at the "Brussels 1900" exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris.
Art · Museums · Paris · People
Behind the creation of the Statue of Liberty lies a grand financial epic. The monument's makers resorted to crowdfunding long before the term existed, although in those years many monuments were built by subscription, and anyone who wished could contribute his mite. So it was in this case:
Faith · Art · Museums · Observations · Rome
Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole Him away while we slept Gospel of Matthew 28:13. Perhaps this is a mistaken reading, but I find the sleeping guards in Prospero Fontana's "Resurrection of Christ" (1563–1565), from the collection of the Accademia di
Archaeology · Museums · Observations · Science
The first image shows a gold stater from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, struck under Verica, ruler of the British tribe of the Atrebates in the 1st century AD. Strange news about Verica appeared the other day. The archaeologist Miles Russell of Bournemouth University claims that Verica
Archaeology · Museums · Science
Off the coast of Wales, a sixteenth-century brass combination lock has been lifted from the seabed at the wreck site of the English merchant ship Anne Francis, which went down in a storm in 1583. Spanish silver coins were found beside the lock, which is why the researchers believe
The East · Coming Up · Art · London · Museums
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has at last done what museums usually avoid on administrative grounds: it has placed in a single gallery Byzantine and Ottoman objects that spent a century and a half in different departments. The exhibition Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires opens on
Art · Museums · Mores · Paris
The bronze sculpture "Ancient Sacrifice" from the Louvre's collection at the exhibition "Jeanne du Barry. The Invention of the Favourite" at Marly. The group has been placed in an interior setting rather than a display case, just as in the eighteenth century, when such
The Golden Age · Archive · Architecture · Art · Museums
In an 1856 photograph by the Berlin photographer Leopold Ahrendts, attentive spectators on the steps of Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin are absorbed in August Kiss's sculpture "Amazon on Horseback Attacked by a Panther". Cast in the 1840s, the sculpture was a sensation for
Archaeology · Museums · Heritage · Science · Society · Paris
In Pushkin's “Autumn” the grove sheds its last leaves; in France this October it was rather shop windows and town halls that were being shaken, and since this coincided with my customary Parisian holiday, a good part of the month in the channel passed to the sound of