Displaying items by tag: statues

The Victoria and Albert Museum has raised funds to buy four bronze angels originally designed for the tomb of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII's influential advisor. The V&A said last year it would cost £5 million to secure the figurines.

The statues are "a vital part of our national history and artistic heritage," director Martin Roth said. The cardinal, who appears in Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall - currently being shown on BBC1 - died in 1530.

The Italian government on Wednesday said police had seized more than 5,000 ancient artifacts in a record 45-million-euro haul after dismantling a Swiss-Italian trafficking ring. Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said it was the country's "largest discovery yet" of looted works and consisted of 5,361 pieces, including vases, jewelry, frescoes and bronze statues, all dating from the 8th century BC to the 3rd century AD. The archaeological treasures came from illegal digs across Italy and "will be returned to where they were found," the minister told reporters.

The British Museum could soon be coming to your living room – if, that is, you have a 3D printer on hand.

Working in collaboration with Sketchfab, an online platform that lets users share and download 3D scans, the British Museum has created 14 3D models of busts, statues and sarcophagi from its collection for anyone to download and print at home.

The museum’s “first downloadable collection” includes a granite head of Egyptian pharaoh Amenemhat III from the 12th Dynasty (around 1800 BC).

Masterpieces by Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Claude Monet and Henri Matisse will be among the 300 artworks to be loaned from French museums to the Louvre Abu Dhabi for its December 2015 opening.

The £400m museum will feature paintings and sculptures from 13 French cultural institutions, including Leonardo da Vinci’s "Portrait of an Unknown Woman," Claude Monet’s "Saint Lazare Station" and Andy Warhol’s "Big Electric Chair" as well as ancient statues, vases and masks from across Asia and Africa.

The loaned works will join the permanent collection of Louvre Abu Dhabi, which will be the first universal museum to open in the Arab world.

For 2,500 years, the six sisters stood unflinching atop the Acropolis, as the fires of war blazed around them, bullets nicked their robes, and bombs scarred their curvaceous bodies. When one of them was kidnapped in the 19th century, legend had it that the other five could be heard weeping in the night.

But only recently have the famed Caryatid statues, among the great divas of ancient Greece, had a chance to reveal their full glory.

For three and a half years, conservators at the Acropolis Museum have been cleaning the maidens, Ionic columns in female form believed to have been sculpted by Alkamenes, a student of ancient Greece’s greatest artist, Phidias.

On Tuesday, March 4, agents from Homeland Security Investigations raided a Long Island City storage locker belonging to a family member of Subhash Kapoor, a former New York gallery owner accused of smuggling Indian antiquities into the United States. Authorities seized hundreds of Southeast Asian and Indian objects that they valued at $8 million.

Kapoor, a once-established antiquities dealer, ran the Art of the Past Gallery on Madison Avenue from 1974 until his arrest overseas in 2011. In October, Kapoor’s sister was charged with hiding four bronze statues of Hindu deities valued at $14.5 million and in December, Kapoor’s office manager pleaded guilty to six counts of criminal possession of stolen property valued at $35 million.

Kapoor is accused of hiring looters to steal rare bronze and stone sculptures of Hindu deities. U.S. officials claim that he would then illegally import the objects, create false provenances for them, and sell them to collectors and museums. Kapoor is currently awaiting trial in India.    

In November 2015, Chicago’s Field Museum will debut ‘The Greeks,’ a major exhibition of Greek antiquities organized in collaboration with the National Hellenistic Museum, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Over 500 artifacts will travel to Chicago from 22 Greek museums making the show the most comprehensive exhibition about Ancient Greece to visit North America in nearly 10 years.

Works on view will include a celebrated bust of Alexander the Great, statues of Archaic-period Kouroi, and jewelry from famous tombs. ‘The Greeks’ will go on view in Ontario before traveling to Chicago and then moving to the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C.

After eight years, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s  $350-million expansion and renovation project has come to a close. The museum’s west wing opened to the public last week, revealing new galleries adorned with statues, sculptures, and other works from China, India and southeast Asia.

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s expansion project began in 2005 and new galleries for Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and African art opened in 2010. Last year, the museum opened a glass-enclosed atrium, which connects the old museum buildings to the new structures. The project has created significantly more exhibition space and room for educational programs and events at the museum. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art was established in 1913 and is celebrated for its substantial collections of Asian and Egyptian art. 

The Dallas-based auction company, Heritage, will host a number of sales featuring objects from Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s (1841-1919) personal archive starting on September 19, 2013 in New York. Items include the artist’s eyeglasses, funeral receipts, clothing, paperwork, photos, medals, statues and books signed by fellow artists. The sale will also include letters and writings by Renoir that detail his travels, inspirations for paintings and relationships with models and dealers.

During the 1970s, Renoir’s heirs moved from France to Canada and then to Texas, taking the artist’s belongings with them. The trove, which will be broken into 150 lots, has been stored in various spots across North America until now. Scholars are hoping that an institutional buyer will step up and make a bulk purchase as the collection holds significant historic value.

The collection was put up for auction once before in 2005 but it failed to sell. Following the sale, anonymous buyers from Arizona purchased the lot. They are now consigning the works to Heritage.

Two 10^th century statues that were looted from jungle temples have been returned to Cambodia by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met announced in May 2013 that they would send the Khmer sculptures known as Kneeling Attendants back to Cambodia after being displayed in the museum’s Asian Wing for 10 years.

Hab Touch, director general at the Ministry of Culture, said, “The return of the statues is a historic event for us.” Seven Buddhist monks blessed the life-size statues during a religious ceremony attended by officials from the government and the Met at the airport. Upon their return to Cambodia, the sculptures will be put on display at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh and later kept at either the National Museum in the capital or at a museum in the northwestern city of Siem Reap.

The two statues were looted from the Koh Ker temple site in the early 1970s. At the time, Cambodia was being ravaged by a brutal civil war and looting was rampant. The works were donated piece by piece to the Met in the late 1980s and 1990s. Recent documentary research revealed that the statues were in fact looted from Cambodia.