Aristocracy · Archive · Museums · Mores · People
Nothing special, just the elderly Marchesa Maria Arconati-Visconti playing a bored Renaissance page at home, in the Dutch castle of Gaasbeek. A great eccentric even in her youth, in her declining years the Marchesa Arconati-Visconti devoted herself to decorating and refurbishing a castle in the Southern Netherlands, which
NB! · Museums · Observations · Society · Saint Petersburg
A queue for the Kunstkamera. The museum has thrown open its doors free of charge at the very peak of the coronavirus wave. Colleagues, are you quite sure this was the right decision? Does nothing give you pause?
Moscow · Museums · Observations · Society
The news dates from the end of November, when one could still visit museums after a fashion, but all the same: ticket revenue at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts fell by almost 70% in 2020 compared with the previous year. What are other museums to do, those without
NB! · Archaeology · Monarchies · Museums · Science · People · Rome
Archaeology · Museums · Observations · Pop Culture
Found an absolutely brilliant show, Abandoned Mine Explorers: a group of enthusiasts roams North America in search of old mines condemned to destruction, levelling and oblivion. The explorers descend to the very bottom of forgotten tunnels and shafts and hunt for objects left behind by miners a hundred years ago.
Museums · Science · Palaeontology · Nature
A mother dinosaur watches over her brood. This is a photograph of the display at the Museum of the Rockies, where in the 1980s and 1990s the skeleton of a Maiasaura stood beside a model of a dinosaur nest with growing hatchlings. The point is that a nest of just
Art · Museums · Science
A painting by the surgeon Charles Bell, 1809, hangs in the Edinburgh Surgeons' Hall. Bell resolved to paint this canvas after witnessing the torments of tetanus among wounded British soldiers following the battle against Napoleon's troops at Corunna. The picture captures the final stage of tetanus, when
Coming Up · Art · Museums · Saint Petersburg
At the Sheremetev Palace, the International Exhibition "In Diaghilev's Circle. Intersecting Destinies" runs until 12 February 2021, devoted to the creative path of Sergei Diaghilev. The career of the foremost ideologue of Russian culture is presented through portraits of the Diaghilev circle drawn from museums around
Architecture · Faith · Museums · Observations · Heritage · Mores
Visited the town of Volokolamsk, one of the oldest in the Moscow Region, with its ancient kremlin on a 17-metre rise on the left bank of the little River Gorodnya, where the year of foundation (in fact, of first mention) is laid out on the slope: 1136. Inside the
Coming Up · Books · Museums
Museum life is not confined to the big cities. In Sarapul, for example, the House-Museum of the mining engineer and academician Nikolai Melnikov (1909-1980) is showing “Brockhaus and Efron: The History of One Encyclopaedia” until the end of the year, marking 130 years since the publication of the
Museums · Observations · Mores
But you have surely seen, in one or other of the small museums of southern Italy or Greece, similar exhibits made in a simpler technique. The people of the eighteenth century, too, adored adorning their homes and were not strangers to design inventions. I remember a splendid specimen of a
Coming Up · The East · Art · Museums
If you still remember Prigov's 80th anniversary, about which everyone was writing only recently, take note of the exhibition "Prigov Days in Vladikavkaz" at the North Caucasian Branch of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. On show are sketches for installations, texts, stikhogrammy, video works