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IMAGE: Alex Tabarrok/X Imply ‘only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong’ A British museum owned by the University of Cambridge recently “overhauled” its displays with “new signage,” one of which states paintings of the British countryside can conjure up sinister “nationalist feelings.” According to The Telegraph, the Fitzwilliam Museum underwent a “refurbishment” over the last half-decade with “an emphasis on reflecting the ‘evolution of its collection.’” The museum reopened last week with galleries based on themes rather than chronology. A sign for the new “Nature” gallery reads Landscape paintings were also always entangled...

Scholars have in fact long debated whether or not the painting is a Raphael original... a new method of analysis based on an AI algorithm has sided with those who think at least some of the strokes were at the hand of another artist.Researchers from the UK and US developed a custom analysis algorithm based on the works that we know are the result of the Italian master's brushwork...Machine learning processes typically need to be trained on a vast pool of examples, something which isn't always available when it comes to a sole artist's life work. In this case, the...

Italian Portraiture, including Raphael, to Early Venetian Lute Music Art sleuths have created a 3D reconstruction of the face of Italian painter Raphael, solving an age-old mystery over his final resting place, Rome's Tor Vergata University said. The artist, a child prodigy and part of a trinity of Renaissance greats along with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, died in 1520, aged only 37. A red rose graces his tomb in Rome's Pantheon all year round. His body was exhumed in the 19th century, at which point a plaster cast of his skull was made. But experts were not sure the...

Raphael died in Rome 500 years ago today. Rome was to have been the focal point in the global celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the death of the High Renaissance artist and architect Raphael, hosting an "unprecedented" exhibition, the greatest Raphael show the world had ever seen. The Raphael exhibition saw a boom in the purchase of pre-sale tickets, with thousands of people around the world planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy to see the groundbreaking show, featuring no less than 100 paintings by the Renaissance master, with 40 masterpieces on loan from the Uffizi in Florence. Raphael's much-anticipated...

Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. (Credit: Wiki Commons.)ROME - For the first time since 1983, all ten of Raphael’s grand tapestries depicting the lives of Saints Peter and Paul will be exhibited together in the Sistine Chapel, hanging at eye level beneath Michelangelo’s frescoed ceiling as was the original intention. Scheduled to be on display Feb. 17-23, 2020, this will be the Vatican’s way of honoring the famous Renaissance master as the world marks the 500th anniversary of his death. The last time they were presented was for the 500th anniversary of his birth. The artist, who died in...

A painting once believed to be a $25 copy caught the eye of an art historian during the filming of a new BBC series — and turned out to be a $26 million Raphael. The Madonna composition had been covered in dirt and hanging above a door in the dusty corner of a room in the Haddo House, one of the National Trust for Scotland’s 18th-century homes in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. “I thought, crikey, it looks like a Raphael,” the historian, Bendor Grosvenor, told The Guardian. “It was very dirty, under old varnish, which goes yellow.”

People view one of Raphael's tapestries hanging from a wall of the Sistine Chapel July 14. (CNS photo) By Carol GlatzCatholic News Service VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Like long-lost twins, two halves of an artistic masterpiece conceived by the Renaissance master Raphael will be reunited for the first time. The Vatican Museums and London's Victoria and Albert Museum will exhibit side-by-side some of Raphael's enormous tapestries for the Sistine Chapel and his preparatory paintings. The joint initiative is meant to coincide with Pope Benedict XVI's first visit to the United Kingdom in September. Since the Renaissance, "the cartoons and...

In this third “class” of this second Art Appreciation series, we’ll examine the various styles of the Renaissance. The Renaissance in Italy is the most varied and the most famous, but there is also a Renaissance in northern Europe, with the works of Bosch, Durer and Brueghel. (If you want to see the other lectures of this series to which I refer here, check on my name below to get to my homepage for clickable links to those very lectures.) Renaissance means “rebirth” of classical Greek and Roman realism, grace, and dignity. If you remember back to lesson two of...

MILAN (Reuters) - The tiny pearl brooch seems an innocuous detail in Raphael's enigmatic "Fornarina" portrait, but for one group of historians it unlocks a scandalous love affair kept secret for centuries. According to new research published in May, the pearl, pinned onto an elaborate turban, is part of a web of allusions to the Renaissance artist's clandestine marriage to the beautiful sitter, a baker's daughter -- despite a very public engagement to the niece of a powerful Vatican cardinal. Officially, Raphael died a bachelor at 37. "It was an impossible love affair," says Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz, editor of specialist...

Human fossils, an amber room and a Raphael masterpiece all went missing during WWII.War has always brought chaos, and with it an opportunity for pillage and plunder. This was especially true during World War II, when countless pieces of priceless art, artifacts and other treasure were destroyed and spirited away from both Europe and the Asia Pacific. Nazis, in particular, systematically looted cultural property from museums, private homes and royal palaces, some of it to help Adolf Hitler build his proposed Führermuseum, but other armies carried away their own spoils as well. When the war ended, tales of real and...

Sometimes, additional provenance information about a painting can significantly increase its perceived value. In the case of a small nocturne showing a Biblical scene, a shift in attribution from the Circle of Rembrandt to the actual Dutch master himself has increased its auction estimate by several hundred-fold. When The Adoration of the Kings was last auctioned by Christie’s in Amsterdam in 2021, it had an estimate of €10,000 to €15,000. Sotheby’s is now listing the oil on oak panel with an estimate of £10 million to £15 million ($12.2 million to $18.4 million) as part of its OId Masters and...

The painting Saint Sebastian Tended By Two Angels by Flemish master Sir Peter Paul Rubens will go to auction at Sotheby’s in London in early July with a high estimate of $7.7 million, according to the auction house. The sale will be the first time the painting has gone to auction since it was confirmed to have been painted by Rubens. When the work was last sold at auction in 2008 — at Ivey-Selkirk, a St. Louis auction house, for $40,000 — it was misattributed as the work of French artist Laurent de la Hyre, according to Artnet News. That...

A painting dated from the 16th century depicting the biblical figures of Adam and Eve, looted from the collection of Dutch-Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker during World War II, has been returned to Goudstikker’s only living heir. The scene, attributed to Dutch artist Cornelis van Haarlem, was returned after being offered for donation by a private collector to Musée Rolin, a museum in Autun, a city in central-eastern France. According to New York law firm Kaye Spiegler, which facilitated the painting’s return, museum officials raised flags internally over the painting’s ownership record after uncovering a label with Goudstikker’s surname on...

A former New York City dog walker thought he was going to get a $10 million payday when a painting he’d come to own by a famous artist — whose works sell for millions of dollars — went to auction this week. The retiree, who is living off Social Security, was devastated when the painting sold for a meager $40,000. Mark Herman, 68, of Manhattan, said he had a vision while on psychedelic mushrooms that the painting by the late abstract artist Chuck Close would be worth $10 million. But that drug-induced dream crumbled as he watched the work sell...

If you want these happy little trees, you’ll need a lot of green. Beloved TV artist Bob Ross’s first-ever on-air painting is up for sale and costs almost $10 million. The late host of PBS’s “The Joy of Painting” became massively popular for his friendly, calm demeanor and his insistence that anyone can become an artist. Now Modern Artifact Gallery in Minneapolis is selling “A Walk in the Woods,” the first of over 400 paintings Ross made on the show. Ross painted it for the premiere episode which aired on January 11, 1983. “It is season one, episode one of...

Caravaggio was known for his revolutionary way of playing with light in his paintings and, amongst other things, allegedly killing a man over a game of tennis. While that may sound like disparate facts, they entwine bizarrely in The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, the only painting Caravaggio ever deigned to sign, work that held a clue supposedly confessing to murder. Caravaggio revolutionised the use of chiaroscuro, wherein light dictates the viewers’ focus. Bright shafts of light make figures rise up out of the canvas, and imposing shadows condemn others to the background. This sense of hiding in the...

When scientists said that they had used artificial intelligence to determine that Raphael had, in fact, painted a work whose attribution had long been contested, they received rapturous praise in publications across the globe. But now a more complicated picture of the situation has emerged, with some experts questioning the accuracy of the attribution. One scientist’s study of the attribution suggested a completely different result from the one used to certify the Raphael attribution, and two museum professionals told the Guardian Saturday that AI had a high likelihood of being incorrect. Related Articles A narrow tower of perhaps five stories...

Ikea bags transport a lot of things because of their large size, durability, and relatively low cost to consumers. But recently, the signature item from the Danish furniture and home goods retailer held a stolen painting by Vincent van Gogh, The Parsonage garden at Nuenen in Spring. Three and a half years ago, the work was stolen from the Singer Laren museum in a smash-and-grab robbery while the institution was closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The 1884 painting had been on loan to the Singer Laren from the Groninger Museum voor Stad en Lande in the Netherlands. Video security...

A new exhibition at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, Netherlands, shows how Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece, Girl with a Pearl Earring, has changed over time. Using the latest imaging technology, including a new 108-billion-pixel scan by 3D digital microscopy company Hirox, researchers were able to better understand what this work may have looked like when Vermeer first painted it around 1665. “We found out some really exciting things about the girl,” says painting conservator Abbie Vandivere at the Mauritshuis. “For instance, that the background used to be a green curtain, and that she has eyelashes that are now no longer...

A massive portrait and several golf clubs gifted to former President Donald Trump by foreign leaders while in office are unaccounted for, according to a report released by House Democrats on Friday. The missing gifts are among more than 100 – worth nearly $300,000 – that Trump and his family failed to disclose, as required by law, the interim staff report by House Oversight Committee Democrats notes. During its year-long investigation, the committee discovered White House emails referencing a “larger than-life-sized painting” of Trump commissioned by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. The work of art was delivered to the US Embassy...