Once the official sculptor in the court of the last Habsburg king, Luisa Roldán is easily the most famous sculptor you’ve never heard of.
art conservation
Posted inArt
US Army Teams Up With Conservators to Preserve Outdoor Art
Art conservators and the Army Research Laboratory are working together to conserve outdoor painted sculpture by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Tony Smith.
Posted inArt
Watch the British Museum Conserve Its Largest Print, a 16th-Century Dürer Woodcut
Albrecht Dürer’s “Triumphal Arch” is one of the largest prints ever made, and after a century on view at the British Museum, its conservation was a colossal task.
Posted inArt
After Surviving a Fire, St. John the Divine’s 17th-Century Tapestries Return
After a catastrophic 2001 fire, the 17th-century Barberini tapestries have returned to view at Manhattan’s Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.
Posted inArt
Restoring a Tiffany Mosaic and Its Ethereal Light to a Bronx Cemetery
The Tiffany-designed 1914 Swan Memorial in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery is being restored after over a century of deterioration in the open air.
Posted inArt
Saving a 220-Year-Old Eagle, the Oldest Military Sculpture in the US
One of the oldest locally-carved sculptures in New York City has weathered two centuries out on Governors Island in the New York Harbor.
Posted inIn Brief
New Artificial Nose Sniffs Out Art-Harming Pollutants
When 90 years’ worth of original drawings and sketches from Walt Disney Animation Studios traveled internationally for the first time this summer, they were accompanied by a newfangled protective device: an optoelectronic “nose.”
Posted inArt
Scientists Identify the Fungi Clouding Leonardo’s Self-Portrait
A red chalk sketch from around 1512 CE, long believed to be a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, has a glowering, bearded man’s face emerging from a swarm of brown spots. Kept safely in the vaults of the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, the portrait’s power, despite the imperfections, has even gained rumors of supposedly magical powers.
Posted inIn Brief
Erased Nude Discovered in a Leonardo da Vinci Notebook
It seems like there’s always something new to discover in the thousands of pages of notes and drawings left behind by Leonardo da Vinci, whether it’s a sketch for an early refrigerator or an illustration of a viola organista fusing a piano with a stringed instrument.
Posted inArt
Undoing a 19th-Century Art Restorer’s Overzealous Handiwork
The 19th-century art restorer Raffaele Gargiulo was so good at reconstructing Greek vases, one antiquarian called it a “dangerous perfection for knowledge.” Filling in broken gaps with his own paintings, mending cracks with brass staples, his work was a potential threat to history.
Posted inArt
Matisse’s “Swimming Pool” Goes on View for the First Time in Two Decades
When Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs opened this past Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the artist’s only site-specific cut-out piece went on public view for the first time in over 20 years.
Posted inArt
Chemistry of the Canvas: Returning the Red to a Renoir
Art as we see it now isn’t always as the artist intended. After the paint dries, there’s still chemistry happening on the canvas.