Category: visual

After 12 years of planning and a further 22 years of conservation work, all ten panels from the … Florentine Renaissance masterpiece by Lorenzo Ghiberti, have been restored to their former glory … The monumental set of gilded bronze doors, constructed between 1425 and 1452, stand at just over five metres tall and contain scenes from the Old Testament.”

“We are used to seeing his pieces in the context of nature,” says the director of Gagosian’s London gallery. “I thought it would be interesting to show them in a clean well-lit space. There is a sense of their hugeness, which you get less of outside, and a tension, because you get the feeling they can almost break down the building.”

The 14-story building in Washington Heights, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will have an entirely transparent southern façade that will allow the public to see into some very oddly shaped open-plan floors.

“The controversial destruction of monuments has contributed to recent anti-government protests in Russia, even though a number of preservationists believe that Moscow’s authorities are doing a better job of saving landmark buildings under Sergei Sobyanin, who was elected as the city’s mayor in 2010, than under his predecessor Yuri Luzhkov, who was notorious for allowing historical architecture to be demolished.”

“The thieves received $1200 for selling the sculptures as scrap but the art is valued at upwards of $250,000. The pieces were not insured.”

“Crime Stoppers of Houston is officially on the lookout for suspected art vandal Uriel Landeros, 22, after a tipster identified him as responsible for the defacing a 1929 Picasso painting in the surrealist galleries of the Menil Collection on June 13.” Landeros is an art student at the University of Houston.

“Two Getty branches, the museum and conservation group, have teamed up to work on the painting together. The head of paintings conservation for the museum, Yvonne Szafran, named three goals for their work. One is to address the sagging of the canvas at the center caused by its weight and size. Another is to replace or reinforce the stretcher. A third goal, if possible, is to remove the varnish that was added after Pollock’s lifetime.”

“The Roman road was about 1,800 years old, while remains of an older road built by the ancient Greeks 500 years earlier were found underneath it.”

“Preservationists are voicing growing concerns about Moscow’s architectural heritage and the state’s role in ensuring it survives. The controversial destruction of monuments has contributed to recent anti-government protests in Russia,” though current mayor Sergei Sobyanin is seen as more sympathetic to such concerns than his demolition-happy predecessor, Yuri Luzhkov.

“Middlesex University’s Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture (MoDA) closed its public gallery spaces last summer,” going online-only. MoDA’s senior curator insists “that MoDA is still a museum – after all, the point of a museum is to share collections and it will still do that.” She also “reject[s] the term ‘virtual museum’, which she said implies that it doesn’t exist in reality.”