Ornamentation Designed to Lay Over the Neckline of a Robe
Gemstones and Inlay include: Gold, Turquoise, Garnet, Pyrites
Tillya Tepe (Afghanistan), 1st century AD/CE
National Museum of Afghanistan (Currently on Exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales)
Art & Culture
Scenes from Europe
Stunning Art from Thai Peck (Blog laroseedespetiteschoses) . . . Beautifully done!
Archaeologists Unearth New Areas Of Ancient Roman City
“Archaeologists Unearth New Areas Of Ancient Roman City”
by Emily Thomas via “Huffington Post“
“Archaeologists in Rome have unearthed a massive section of the ancient port city of Ostia, shedding new light on the city’s historical significance.
Researchers for the Portus Project — an archaeology initiative led by Britain’s Southampton University and Cambridge University — working in collaboration with the British School at Rome and top Roman archaeologists discovered a new boundary wall that greatly extends the Ostia city limits. In the new geophysical survey, archaeologists also found massive warehouses the size of footballs fields which most likely held imported goods before they were sent on to Rome.
”Our results are of major importance for our understanding of Roman Ostia and the discoveries will lead to a major rethink of the topography of one of the iconic Roman cities in the Mediterranean,” Professor Simon Keay, director of the Portus Project, told The Telegraph.
The new findings counter a previously held belief that the Tiber River, which flows into the Mediterranean Sea, was Ostia’s northern border. The recent excavation, however, shows that Ostia’s land continued on the other side of the river. This new area was referred to in antiquity as Isola Sacra, or Sacred Island. . . . . ”
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“Cornelius Gurlitt and the complexities of rehoming Nazi-looted art”
“Cornelius Gurlitt and the complexities of rehoming Nazi-looted art”
by Rita Lobo via “European CEO“
“A priceless haul of invaluable art thought to have been destroyed by the Nazi’s has recently been uncovered in Germany, raising questions about if and how artefacts are returned to their rightful owners or their heirs
When the Bavarian customs officer searched Cornelius Gurlitt aboard a train crossing the Lindau Border in 2010, he had no way of knowing that he was about to reignite one of the fiercest cultural debates in European history. Gurlitt, the son of an important German art curator during World War II, turned out to be sitting on a veritable trove of priceless works of art thought to have been lost during or shortly after the war – a fact only discovered because police raided his home on suspicions of tax evasion.
An elderly recluse living in an affluent neighbourhood of Munich, Gurlitt had inherited from his father, Hildebrand, over 1,200 pieces the curator had acquired during the war. The story of how Hildebrand Gurlitt came to be in possession of such an array of what the Nazi’s had labelled ‘degenerate art’ – during a time when collectors were fleeing Europe in droves – is murky at best. But because Germany does not have a law preventing anyone or any institutions from owning looted art, it is unlikely that the provenance of Gurlitt’s collection matters very much, should he wish to retain it.
There is no evidence that Hildebrand, who was part Jewish, stole any . . . .”
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New Deal Treasure: Government Searches For Long-Lost Art
“New Deal Treasure: Government Searches For Long-Lost Art”
by Brian Naylor via “NPR“
“At the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt enacted a raft of New Deal programs aimed at giving jobs to millions of unemployed Americans; programs for construction workers and farmers — and programs for writers and artists.
“Paintings and sculpture were produced, murals were produced and literally thousands of prints,” says Virginia Mecklenburg, chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The GSA recovered Anne Fletcher’s Iris Garden after its then-owner watched an episode of PBS’s Antiques Roadshow and realized the painting was actually a WPA piece.
Courtesy of the U.S. GSA Fine Arts Program
In all, hundreds of thousands of works were produced by as many as 10,000 artists. But in the decades since, many of those works have gone missing — lost or stolen, they’re now scattered across the country.
A Transformative Time For American Artists
The biggest New Deal art program was the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Artists could earn up to $42 a week, as long as they produced something.
Mecklenburg says it was a transformative time for the artists: “The idea for an artist to be able to work through a problem, to work through ideas, you know, that’s golden. So it was a very special moment, and one that really has not ever been repeated.”
To qualify for the work, however, you had to prove yourself as an artist and you had to show you were poor. Mecklenburg spoke to two brothers-in-law who were in the program.
She says, “One of them was saying, you know, you had to prove you were penniless — he said it hurt your dignity. And the other one was so cavalier and devil-may-care about it. He said: Oh, you know, if you thought the relief worker was coming to check out if you had an iron, or anything else that looked like it was of value, you just ran it over to the neighbor’s apartment so it looked like you didn’t have any possessions at all. It’s about as human a story as we’ve ever come up with in the art world.”
Every Recovered Painting Has A Story
Some of the art became famous — such as the murals . . . . .”
The Cultured Muse 