Free Republic

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...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) --  Sally Jessy Raphael's daytime talk show, the longest-running of its genre, has been canceled after nearly two decades on the air.</p> <p>Her show had sunk to ninth in the ratings among talk shows, after being third only to Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer three years ago.</p>