The East · Monarchies · Mores · People
Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary was born in 1932 to an Iranian diplomat and a German aristocrat. She spoke several languages fluently, received a European education and from her youth stood out for her extraordinary beauty. In 1951 Soraya married Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran. Theirs would have been an ideal
Coming Up · Architecture · Art · Museums · People
In the early 2000s Eduard Steinberg, a representative of the second wave of the Russian avant-garde, a nonconformist, one of those whose art turned away from the Soviet norm towards pure geometry and metaphysics, built a house in Tarusa, which he made his working studio, where he painted and
Archaeology · Science · People
At the Guatemalan site of Xultun, archaeologists have for the first time deciphered the name of an ancient Maya mathematician-astronomer: Sak Tan Wash, "White-Breasted Fox". The inscription was found among more than fifty mathematical micro-texts on the wall of a small room that researchers regard
Archaeology · The East · Museums · Heritage · New York · People
An interesting man, to be sure, the Manhattan prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos, who since 2003, when he witnessed the mass looting in Baghdad with his own eyes, has devoted himself to fighting the trade in stolen antiquities. The unit of the New York police that he heads has seized thousands of
Archive · Books · Heritage · People
But if that is unattainable, if not only may I not lie there, but that cemetery is no more, I should like a stone from the Tarusa quarry to be set up on one of those hills over which the Kirillovnas walked to us at Pesochnoye, and we to them
Art · Museums · Observations · People
One of the strongest impressions of this year: the series of Madonnas by Giovanni Bellini in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. Bellini painted this subject more than eighty times in the course of his life, so there is no better material for watching his mastery develop. The Madonnas
Faith · Art · Museums · People
Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is a former monastery turned psychiatric hospital. It was here that Vincent van Gogh admitted himself voluntarily in May 1889, a few months after cutting off part of his ear in Arles, and he spent a year here, until May 1890.
Archive · Art · Moscow · People
Photograph by Igor Palmin, 1974
Coming Up · Art · Museums · Education · People · Saint Petersburg
The Hermitage has opened the exhibition "A Feat of Enlightened Philanthropy" for the 150th anniversary of the Central School of Technical Drawing, founded by Baron Alexander Ludwigovich Stieglitz (1814-1884), the greatest Russian banker of his age, who financed the state loans for the Crimean War and the
Books · Science · Society · People
The theoretical physicist and co-creator of loop quantum gravity Carlo Rovelli has published a book not about physics but about the looming danger of nuclear catastrophe. The book is called "85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist's Case Against Rearmament". The title refers to the Doomsday
Observations · People · Humour
So here is a man with a telling surname
NB! · Art · People