Category: visual

Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519, and in the last 500 years, no three-dimensional works of art by him have come to light. “The 20 inch-tall sculpture, made of red clay, depicts the Virgin Mary, with an enigmatic smile similar to that of Mona Lisa, looking down at a smiling baby Jesus on her lap.” – NPR

There has been plenty of disagreement about whether the painting of Judith beheading Holofernes that turned up in Toulouse in 2016 is an original Caravaggio or a copy. But the people selling it are doing the right things: allowing every scholar that wants examine it access, being generous with shows to the public, and leaving the sale to the auctioneer that found it rather than passing it to Sotheby’s or Christie’s. If only this sort of behavior weren’t so rare. – Apollo

“After a five-month search, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem has hired Brian Kennedy as its new director and CEO. Kennedy, now 57 years old, was born in Dublin and has worked for museums on three continents, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and the National Gallery of Ireland. He currently heads the Toledo Museum of Art, where he’s been since 2010.” – WBUR (Boston)

The role of copies still raises larger questions about the mission of museums and the nature of authenticity. Does it matter if the works of art or historical objects on display are copies? Does it render the experience of visitors less meaningful? And are the institutions that don’t clearly identify the copies in some way shirking their responsibility to the public? – Washington Post

If they hadn’t found each other in the New York art scene, the players involved could have met on a Spike Jonze film set: a computer scientist commanding five-figure print sales from software that generates inkjet-printed images; a former hotel-chain financial analyst turned Chelsea techno-gallerist with apparent ties to fine-arts nobility; a venture capitalist with two doctoral degrees in biomedical informatics; and an art consultant who put the whole thing together, A-Team–style, after a chance encounter at a blockchain conference. Together, they hope to reinvent visual art, or at least to cash in on machine-learning hype along the way. – The Atlantic

“Archaeologists hunting for a sacred well beneath the ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula have accidentally discovered a trove of more than 150 ritual objects — untouched for more than a thousand years — in a series of cave chambers that may hold clues to the rise and fall of the ancient Maya.” – National Geographic

Justin Davidson: “There’s a certain slyly subversive quality to the displays of manuscripts, ceiling frescoes, foods, scientific instruments, silverware, home furnishings, and scenes of Monteverdi opera and Shakespeare performed in Spanish. Here [in Puebla, Mexico], a formerly colonized people have placed the colonists’ culture on display, as if to acknowledge with a hint of surprise that Europe such an advanced civilization in the 17th and 18th century.” – New York Magazine

When it comes to stealing from museums, Stéphane Breitwieser is virtually peerless. He is one of the most prolific and successful art thieves who have ever lived. Done right, his technique—daytime, no violence, performed like a magic trick, sometimes with guards in the room—never involves a dash to a getaway car. – GQ

A growing number of artists claim that their works in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) have gone “missing” and may have ended up on the market without their knowledge.  – The Art Newspaper