"The process" — taking place in a glass chamber in a gallery at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum — "will involve removing varnish that was applied during its 1975-76 restoration and will significantly change the look of the painting, making white paint whiter and dark areas more visible." - The Washington Post (MSN)
"The Vatican and Microsoft on Monday unveiled a digital twin of St. Peter’s Basilica that uses artificial intelligence to explore one of the world’s most important monument’s while helping the Holy See manage visitor flows and identify conservation problems." - AP
The Museum of the Bible is but one more example of “the massive extraction and transfer of cultural heritage objects from the colonized to the colonizers’ countries. Do American institutions still need to accumulate objects from other countries, considering how many they already own?” - The Wall Street Journal
The private sector’s reluctance to solve issues that are of great importance to public institutions creates an opportunity to instead build sector-specific tools that will “break the narrative we are sold by large tech companies.” - Artnet
"The seizures in Italy, France, Spain and Belgium netted 2,100 fake works attributed to more than 30 famed artists, including Andy Warhol, Amedeo Modigliani, Banksy, Pablo Picasso, Joan Mirò, Francis Bacon, Wassily Kandinsky, Henry Moore and Gustav Klimt," potentially worth €200 million. - AP
Prosecutors say Edoardo Almagià kept a list of trafficked antiquities in his NYC apartment, hidden inside a Renaissance-era chest beneath a marble statue of a deer. - Smithsonian
Ninety thousand Parisians died from war and starvation just a couple of years before the first Impressionist show. But “if most fans of Impressionism remain unaware of its intimacy with the horrors of what Victor Hugo dubbed ‘l’année terrible,’ it’s because the Impressionists did not picture them." - The Atlantic
Thanks to a long and protracted civil ward, “the country’s archaeological sites, ancient cities, and pre-Islamic artifacts have become easy targets for looters and unscrupulous art dealers.” - ARTnews
“I really believe that Los Angeles today is what New York was in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, what Paris was in the turn of the century. ...This is the spot.” - The New York Times
On November 7, the artwork A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing (2024) by the humanoid robot artist Ai-Da sold for $1,084,800 during the auction house’s Digital Art day sale. There were 27 bids for the portrait. - ARTnews
"The city drained the fountain to clean it ahead of the Vatican’s Jubilee Year. ... Visitor access to the site is currently via a temporary walkway. But the real problem is the plywood-sided pool on the stairs in front of the fountain into which visitors are now instructed to toss coins." - Artnet
The painting’s essential elements—man, woman, pitchfork—have been referenced, reimagined, and parodied in everything from a 1942 photograph by Gordon Parks to a 2012 episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. - Artnet
The gallery’s owner Mark Peet Visser has described the heist as “amateurish,” noting that explosives used to gain entry were “so violent that my entire building was destroyed,” and even damaged some neighboring shops. This was confirmed by local police in an official update. - Artnet
