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A painting with mysterious origins is likely a Raphael masterpiece, researchers from the U.K. said after using facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the portrait. The Renaissance-era painting, named the de Brécy Tondo, has been studied extensively for more than 40 years. Researchers from the University of Nottingham and University of Bradford used an artificial intelligence facial recognition system developed by Hassan Ugail, a professor of visual computing at Bradford, to determine its likely creator. Instead of DNA, the system uses DNN – a deep neural network – which identifies patterns in images and videos. The system...

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...

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...

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...

White Double THE APPROACH OF THE GREAT SOLEMNITY, which will soon be shedding upon us all the splendors of heaven, seems to inspire the Church with a profound recollection. Except for the homage she must needs pay, on their own date, to the glorious Apostles Simon and Jude, only a few Feasts of simple rite break the silence of these last days of October. Our souls must be in confirmity with the dispositions of our common Mother. It will not, however, be out of keeping to give a thought to the great Archangel, honored today by many particular churches....

NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. RAPHAEL, ARCHANGEL (Beginning October 15) (May be said in public or private. i. 300 Days each day. ii. Plenary, once during the Novena. I, II, IV. See Instructions, p. I, 1910 Raccolta.) ℣. O God, come to my assistance; ℟. O Lord, make haste to help me.     “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. O CHRIST, Splendor of the Father, Life and Strength of the heart, in the presence of the...

White Double THE approach of the great solemnity, which will soon be shedding upon us all the splendors of heaven, seems to inspire the Church with a profound recollection. Except for the homage she must needs pay, on their own date, to the glorious Apostles Simon and Jude, only a few Feasts of simple rite break the silence of these last days of October. Our souls must be in confirmity with the dispositions of our common Mother. It will not, however, be out of keeping to give a thought to the great Archangel, honored today by many particular churches....

Read/print the novena here.

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.”

In these speeches, Cruz sometimes admits — with disbelief — that he once supported Fidel Castro’s revolution. “I started speaking at different rotary clubs around Austin, Texas — in favor of Castro! I still thought he was the savior of the country,” he told FreedomWorks, a conservative group, in 2013. Local news articles and documents from the late 1950s offer a clearer picture of the days of Cruz as a young man, then a believer in the revolution and a visible college activist. On Jan. 8, 1959, Fidel Castro rode victoriously into Havana. The country’s dictator, Batista, had fled a...

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...

The following is a letter from University of Notre Dame alumnus Father John J. Raphael, S.S.J., addressed to ND president Father John Jenkins: 'Dear Fr. Jenkins, 'My name is Fr. John J. Raphael, SSJ. I am a member of ND's graduating class of 1989. I am currently the principal of St. Augustine High School in New Orleans, LA and a member of Notre Dame's Admissions Advisory Board. 'I am writing to express my extreme disappointment and grave disapproval of the decision to invite President Obama to give the commencement address and to receive an honorary degree from Notre Dame at...

The Archangel Raphael by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. We shall concentrate on this meditation on one book of the Old Testament, the book of Tobias, also called the Book of Tobit. Unfortunately as we know, this book is missing in both the Jewish and the Protestant Old Testaments. Jews, after Christianity was established, dropped this book because it was not originally written in Hebrew. And the Protestants dropped the same book saying, “Who better than the Jews know what belongs in the Old Testament.” It is however, one of the inspired writings of the Catholic Church. We will take...

The Three Flames of Divine LoveEvery year on the 29th of September the Church commemorates the three angels whose names have been revealed to us in Scripture for our consolation: Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. There is a fourth angel whose name is also revealed, Lucifer, but for a different reason: to warn us clearly about all his works and empty promises. When God unmasks the identity of angelic beings in the public revelation of the Church it is because He wants us to know something about them that will assist us on the road to Heaven—or give us sufficient warning....

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...

JERUSALEM — The Mossad, Israel's spy agency, this week brought home to her final rest one of its legendary female operatives, Sylvia Raphael. Only now is it being revealed that she was one of the secret agents who penetrated the PLO bases in Jordan and Lebanon four decades ago when a little-known gang leader named Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) was beginning his terrorist attacks. Her story reads like . . . well, like a spy novel. Raphael was born in 1937 in South Africa to a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother. That made her non-Jewish, technically . ....

<p>WASHINGTON — A senior Defense official placed under investigation by the FBI (news - web sites) on allegations that he tried to steer Iraqi reconstruction contracts toward friends has been removed from office, Pentagon (news - web sites) officials confirmed Friday.</p>

Is British National Gallery's New Raphael a Fake? Feb.20, 2004 LONDON (Reuters) - A Raphael painting bought by Britain's National Gallery this month for $41.7 million is a fake, a U.S. art professor says. The gallery secured the "Madonna of the Pinks," which it called the most significant Old Master in any British collection, after a fight to keep it in the country. But James Beck, Professor of Art History at Columbia University in New York and the President of ArtWatch International, told Friday's edition of the Times the gallery had paid "a record price for a fake." "They haven't...