The National Museum of Sweden has acquired an iconic portrait miniature of the 28-year-old Count Hans Axel von Fersen (1755–1810), Swedish diplomat and lover of Queen Marie-Antoinette of France. Long held by descendants of the Fersen family, it went under the hammer in June and sold for 8,376 EUR ($9,112), three times its pre-sale estimate. […]
A cavalry burial containing a rare silver sabretache plate was unearthed in an excavation near the village of Csomád, outside Budapest, Hungary, this July. The artifact consists of a silver exterior plate riveted to an interior bronze plate, and dates to the 10th century Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin. During this period in Hungary,
The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, an 1884 oil-on-paper-on-panel painting by Vincent van Gogh, has been returned to the Groninger Museum three-and-a-half years after it was stolen the Singer Laren museum where it was on loan for an exhibition. It was recovered by private detective Arthur Brand who specializes in recovering stolen and lost
Four years after a late 13th century painting by medieval master Cimabue was discovered in the kitchen of an elderly woman in Compiegne and sold at auction to a private buyer for $26.6 million, Christ Mocked has officially entered the collection of the Louvre Museum. It’s been a long, strange journey for the tempera-on-panel depiction
Restoration of a 17th century portrait of Diana Cecil, great-granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth I’s chief advisor William Cecil, has revealed her original thin upper lip and high forehead, removing the overpaint that had artificially plumped her pucker and lowered her hairline. The conservation also revealed the signature of the artist and the date hidden in
A pair of portraits that are the smallest Rembrandt ever painted have come back to light after falling into obscurity in a private collection for 200 years. Before they were sold at auction this summer, Rijksmuseum experts were engaged to research the works and the subjects. Their exhaustive investigation confirmed the attribution to Rembrandt and
A spectacular three-part window created by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s renowned glass studio and designed by Agnes Northrop has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The monumental windows adorned the Great Hall of Linden Hall, the stately home of in Dawson, Pennsylvania, before they were sold and disappeared into a private collection in 2005.
The UK’s Arts Minister has placed a temporary export bar on a rare 12th century walrus ivory carving of the Deposition from the Cross to give local institutions the opportunity to raise the £2,006,595 (plus VAT of £40,131.90) necessary to acquire it for the nation. It was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
The surviving fragments of the Forma Urbis, the monumental marble map of the city of Rome created between 203 and 211 A.D., have gone on display in a new dedicated museum on the Caelian Hill. The new Museum of Forma Urbis embeds the fragments under the floor of a main hall, superimposed onto Giovanni Battista
A brass Roman arm guard that was found in more than a hundred pieces has been reconstructed by conservators at National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh. It is one of only three Roman lorica segmentata (banded armor) arm guards known to exist today and it is by far the most complete of the three. The pieces of
