Category: visual

The UK has extended a ban on the sale of two Canaletto paintings that would be exported abroad. “Experts told the Department for Culture, Media and Sport the paintings were of such national importance it should try to keep them in the UK. About £6m is needed to match an offer received from abroad to ensure the paintings remain.”

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Italian government have signed a watershed accord on Tuesday under which the Met will return 21 artifacts that Italy says were looted from archaeological sites within its borders. In exchange for yielding the works to Italy — including a prized sixth-century B.C. Greek vase known as the Euphronios krater and a set of Hellenistic silver — the Met will receive long-term loans of prestigious objects from Italian collections.”

A major Metropolitan Museum trustee agrees to talk with the Italian government about disputed artifactgs in her collection. “The Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello, said the trustee, Shelby White, had told him last week that she was willing to meet with Italian cultural officials to discuss eight works she owns that the Italians believe were illicitly excavated and removed from the country. ‘She wants to do the right thing and she is eager for this to be behind her’.”

Slobodan Milosovic is on trial for war crimes. Among the charges? “The intentional and wanton destruction of religious and cultural buildings of the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat communities. This is the first time that anyone has been properly charged in a court of law for wartime attacks on architecture as well as civilians, and a direct connection noted between the two.”

Plans to quarry gravel from the UK’s biggest prehistoric site have been rejected. The site has been “ranked the complex as a “northern Stonehenge”. Although short of dramatic stone relics, the area is rich in burial mounds, traces of settlements and an formal avenue which may have been used for ceremonial funerals.”

Too many buildings get built where they don’t belong or where they aren’t wanted. So how about a Hippocratic Oath for architects…

The UK’s historical buildings are being damaged by climate change. “Every decision we now make that hasn’t factored in climate change is a potential mistake that could cost us time and money to put right later on. This isn’t just to do with protecting an 18th-century house,” he adds. “It’s us saying: this is what our experience is telling us about the whole environment.”

Last month, a German University returned a piece of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. “On the front, it is simply cut, with the outline of part of a male foot, and on the back is a modern incised inscription, in Greek, with the word “Parthenon”. It was not until 1948 that archaeologist German Hafner recognised that it was the heel of figure number 28 in block viii of the north frieze.”

Italy has accepted the Metropolitan Museum’s offer to return 20 artifacts. “The agreement reached in Rome between Italian officials and the director of the Western Hemisphere’s biggest art museum, Philippe de Montebello, may pave the way for other such accords between U.S. museums and countries with rich archaeological resources.”

The Metropolitan Museum’s decision to return artifacts to Italy was Not a decision arrived at recently. “Documents in the case show that much of that evidence had circulated for years — and that while the Met until recently cast skepticism on the Italian claims, it had concluded as early as 2003 that the silver should be returned.”