Category: visual

“Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) will use the 3D scan to reveal features invisible to the naked eye, giving scientists and art historians a new perspective on the painting and helping to uncover some of the mysteries surrounding Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘sfumato’ painting technique.”

“The boom in the Russian art market has been so intense that it has spawned countless forgeries. Many are indifferent landscapes of northern-European origin, which have been embellished with false signatures and details to make non-Russian subjects look Russian and therefore more valuable.”

The two iconicMunch paintings recovered after a dramatic theft two years ago are going back on display in oslo. “The paintings were not so badly damaged that they could not be displayed without full-artistic appreciation.”

The “Sensation” show in 1997 is one of the most famous art exhibitions in the past decade. So where did the art from the show go?

Want to have an art collection like Charles Saatchi’s? Now, you can have his collection. The high-profile collector has “privately published a catalogue of 600 works of art which are available for hire. The glossy 393-page publication provides a fascinating insight into his collection.”

“The 6,000 or so extant pages of text and drawings attributed to Leonardo da Vinci are thought to represent only about one-fifth of his output. Yet, remarkably, in a new show at the Victoria and Albert Museum here, just 62 yellowing sheets suffice to illuminate the endlessly curious and inventive mind of this quintessential Renaissance man. … [T]he display, which runs through Jan. 7, sets out to explore how Leonardo used paper to brainstorm about the mysteries and mechanics of life. And it reveals him to be an early master of lateral thinking.”

“A convicted antiquities smuggler has offered to return a previously unknown ancient masterpiece known as ‘Object X’ to Italy in exchange for reducing the jail time and fines he faces for supplying loot to U.S. museums.”

An early copy of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is being shown in London for the first time in more than 100 years. “The reproduction is thought to have been traced from the original by a French artist, who has not been identified, a century after Leonardo created his masterpiece between 1503 and 1516. Copies of famous paintings were made in those days as it was often difficult to see originals and required long trips.”

“The career curve that is traced [in a new London exhibition] takes Rodin from the youthful emulation of classical figures to a position of extra-ordinary eminence from whose heights he ‘heralded the modern age’… But this avid appetite for contemporary relevance is distracting: the more important point about Rodin is that he was not very modern at all, either in style or subject matter. In fact he was the 19th-century artist writ large, the product of an era when the capture of mainstream art by capital, and by the state, was a recent phenomenon, and when successful artists became not only powerful celebrities but also full participants in the social and economic establishment.”

“It takes a certain chutzpah to argue that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is underrated. The firm is, after all, a colossus of world architecture with well over 10,000 projects to its credit, including several of the most iconic modernist buildings of the 20th century… But none of this quite dispels the sense that when the story of American architecture’s development is told, SOM, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, gets short shrift.”