Category: visual

“Restorers on Tuesday put the finishing touches on a seven-year restoration of two underground burial rooms at the Catacombs of Domitilla, which revealed long-hidden frescoes commissioned some 1600 years ago by the city’s bakers.”

Actually, not all such depictions sported miniature manhoods. But most of the surviving ones do – and that was a deliberate choice, based on both aesthetic and philosophical ideals. Kerry Sullivan explains. (And no, the likenesses weren’t necessarily meant to be realistic.)

If you’re an architect in the right place and time, you don’t change the world but you do get to build something that reflects the changes that are happening.

With 3.71 million followers, Tate (which dropped its “the” when Tate Modern opened in 2000) has a bigger Twitter following than any other museum in the world. It makes millions from its shops and restaurants. But Tate has also helped rebrand London – and perhaps even Britain. Serota was part of a delegation that travelled to China with then Chancellor George Osborne in 2005.

James Romm writes about the “Berlin Painter” – “an artist whose name, nationality, and even gender remain unknown, but whose distinctive and confident illustration in the red-figure style stands out as clearly as any signature.”

“You’re talking about a handful of masterpieces, which are distributed among a few collectors who are not sellers,” said the art dealer Brett Gorvy, a former Christie’s chairman. “You’re going to have to wait a long time if you are a major collector to see another extraordinary painting like this.”

Mussolini’s hometown is a font of fascist memorabilia and marches. “For Frassineti, Predappio’s mayor, building the museum has become an urgent matter, as a number of pro-fascist parades and visitors have drawn increased attention to the town. ‘It is difficult for things to be any worse in Predappio than they are right now,’ he says with barely suppressed impatience. ‘I’m hoping that a serious, sober, historically sound museum will get rid of the neo-fascists that come here, or at least contain them.'”

The “one-man Renaissance” led quite the forging life. “Greenhalgh’s talent was broad: one month he was an Egyptian granite carver, the next an impressionistic sculptor, the next an American watercolourist.”

Paul Leith could adjust to fax machines, but not to computer design. Now he makes art from felt – and doesn’t miss being told what to do by clients.

Her comments were pretty pointedly directed at the men of her generation, most clearly – though she didn’t name names – at Damien Hirst. ““I know artists who make the same fucking work day in, day out. … They make it, they sell it, they make it, they sell it, they make another version, they sell it. They get a bigger house, they sell it.”