Category: visual

Two paintings in a French church have been declared Caravaggios. “It is thought the paintings were probably bought by a French ambassador to Rome, and friend of Caravaggio. The works were kept under the organ loft in the church of Saint Anthony in Loches, until in 1999 a curator expressed an interest in a coat of arms on the works. It turned out to belong to Philippe de Bethune, a minister of France’s King Henry IV, an enthusiastic art collector who befriended Caravaggio in Rome.”

A painting worth an estimated £500,000 has disappeared from Sotheby’s auction rooms in New Bond Street, London. The company won’t say what the work is or who it belongs to.

How did Robert Mang get caught for stealing Cellini’s priceless saltcellar? “After holding the Cellini masterpiece, valued at roughly $60 million, for nearly three years and making two attempts to collect about $12 million in ransom, Mr. Mang was identified as the culprit late last week. On Friday, the police had circulated security camera images of him buying a cellphone that he used to send a text message.”

Working on an ambitious train tunnel to connect Asia and Europe, workers stumble on “the original port of Constantinople, a maze of dams, jetties and platforms that once was Byzantium’s hub for trade with the near east.”

“The Peruvian government is threatening to sue Yale University for the return of all the artifacts found at Machu Picchu. There’s no dispute that Peru gave Bingham permission to take the artifacts to Yale for further study. But Peruvian authorities say they have documents specifying that the material had to be returned within 18 months. It has now been more than 90 years. Yale says that Peruvian law in the 1900s “gave Yale title to the artifacts at the time of their excavation and ever since.”

The UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund has turned down funding for a futuristic museum on Liverpool’s waterfront. The Fund “said it would not be giving the project the £11.4m it asked for, saying the plans were not detailed enough.” Planned exhibits in the building wwould “cover social history and popular culture, and will look at Britain and the world through the eyes of Liverpool.”

A French court convicts a 77-year-old French man for attacking artist Marcel Duchamp’s famed porcelain urinal with a hammer, “rejecting the defendant’s contention that he had increased the value of the art work by making it an ‘original’.”

Los Angeles attorney Randol Schoenberg has spent the past 7 1/2 years arguing that five Gustav Klimt paintings in Austria looted by the Nazis ought to be returned to a California woman. “For Schoenberg — kinetic, restless and intense, with the boundless snap of a Spencer Tracy character — the case is far more than a simple legal wrangle, it’s an obsession.”

The blast happened Monday night. “The investigation indicates that the explosion happened in a storeroom next to the silverware exhibition. The storeroom contains the museum’s master electricity switchboard.”

Timothy Clifford, the outgoing director of Scotland’s National Galleries says the country’s museums should raise enough money to by an Italian masterpiece. He said “there was no need for the galleries to buy more Scottish art, partly because they could rely on wills and gifts to build up their collection. However, spending £10 million on a Michelangelo drawing would break the galleries’ annual acquisitions budget of £1.25 million several times over, and would need a huge fundraising campaign.”