A pair of American tourists were pinched by Italian police when Fiumicino airport authorities in Rome discovered a stolen Pompeii relic in their luggage, reports the Local. The remarkably ill-advised crime rivals our favorite Italian art news story of the year, “Italian Student Smashes Sculpture While Taking Selfie” in its general stupidity.

The massive artifact, which was removed from a building at the historic site, weighed more than 65 pounds, but that wasn’t about to stop the thieves from smuggling it on board an aircraft and back to the States.

The Baltimore Museum of Art is hitting the road.

Special pieces are barnstorming a few Baltimore neighborhoods, making some works accessible to all and giving people the opportunity to be the patron and the artist.

"You don't usually see a small museum in a neighborhood. You usually have to drive to the museum, so it's like a sneak attack," said Katie Bachler, the BMA's Meadows education fellow.

The Wallace Collection's Great Gallery, which contains paintings by masters including Rubens, Velazquez and Titian, has reopened after a £5m refurbishment.

Regarded as one of the finest picture galleries in the UK, the exhibition space had been closed for two years.

The central London gallery boasts some of the most famous 17th Century European paintings in the country.

Starting January of next year, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new municipal identification cards will not only help undocumented immigrants sign leases and meet photo ID requirements, but the cards will also be golden tickets into many of the city’s finest cultural institutions. 33 institutions belonging to the CIG (Cultural Institutions Group) will honor the Municipal ID as a one-year membership with benefits ranging from free admission to museum shop discounts. The 33 CIG members —all private nonprofit institutions on city property — include the Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical Garden, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.

Between wooded ravines north-east of downtown Toronto in Canada, a cone jutting upwards from beige limestone shares a seven-hectare site with a massive rectangle in elegant white granite that resembles an open box. Both structures form a bridge between the tradition and culture of the Islamic world and the present and future of Canada.

The Aga Khan Museum, the 4,370-square-metre chiselled white form, opened to the public on Thursday. Clad in Brazilian granite, it houses the collection of the Aga Khan, the imam of the Ismaili community, in a structure designed by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki.

In 1215, Saher de Quincy, the Earl of Manchester, and 24 other barons forced King John of England to sign the Magna Carta, which limited the king's powers and protected their interests. Since the 1900s, statues of Quincy and other barons have stood in the chamber of the House of Lords in London, "as a reminder to all lords who sit below to keep an eye on the monarchy and make sure absolutism did not recur," said Michael Hatt.

The Quincy statue is in New Haven now, for a limited time, and Hatt couldn't be more delighted. "It's a real coup getting it here," he said.

The latest exhibit at the Bruce Museum being Northern Baroque art to Greenwich, all the way from Vienna. 

"They are lent to us throughout the great generosity of Prince Liechtenstein because they are on permanent loan to the Princely Collections of Liechtenstein in Vienna in the Great Palace.  They range in date from the late 16th Century to the early 19th Century. Most are Dutch and Flemish paintings of the 17th Century. There's also some very fine German 17th Century pictures too," said Peter Sutton, the Executive Director of the Bruce Museum. 

Sutton is an expert on this art and gave a tour of the 64 paintings on display.

A series of lectures on costume design related to “Downton Abbey” and other TV and movie productions are offered at Winterthur this fall. In addition to the British period piece, the lecture series will feature costume designers linked to “Mad Men,” “Saturday Night Live,” “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “The Hunger Games,” “True Blood,” “Deadwood” and Netflix’s “House of Cards.”

Oct. 26, 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. — “Behind the Seams: Perspectives on Costume Design of Downton Abbey,” featuring “Downton Abbey” costume designers Susannah Buxton and Caroline McCall.

The Dallas Museum of Art’s Paintings Conservation Studio has restored what the DMA calls “a rare example of early Renaissance Spanish painting, St. Bonaventure with the Tree of Life.” You can see it today in the museum’s European galleries.

Conservation is part of the new era at the Dallas Museum of Art, as mandated by director Maxwell Anderson, who came to the DMA in 2012. Along those lines, the museum has some big news.

Its Paintings Conservation Studio, an Anderson creation, has restored what the DMA calls “a rare example of early Renaissance Spanish painting, St. Bonaventure With the Tree of Life.” You can see the painting today by going to the DMA’s European galleries.

 Los Angeles’ Getty Foundation has launched a philanthropic initiative to conserve some of the world’s most iconic examples of modern architecture. Keeping It Modern will help preserve these architectural gems through grants ranging from $50,000 to $200,000. The initial ten projects that have been selected to receive funding are Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House in Australia; Hilario Candela’s Miami Marine Stadium in Florida; Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California; Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium in Finland; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Chicago; Ray and Charles Eameses’ residence ‘The Eames House’ in Los Angeles; I.M. Pei’s Luce Memorial Chapel in Taiwan; Max Berg’s Centennial Hall in Wrocław, Poland; Dov Karmi’s Max Liebling House in Tel Aviv; and Le Corbusier’s apartment and studio in Paris.

Keeping It Modern will address the considerable challenges involved with the conservation of modern architecture.

Jackson Pollock’s former Greenwich Village apartment is up for sale for $1.25 million. The 800-square-foot penthouse located at 46 Carmine Street—very convenient to the historic Cedar Tavern, where Pollock and the Ab Ex crew hung out—has 14-foot Tudor-style ceilings, a working fireplace, and “Pirelli floors,” which we assume means they’re great for laying large canvases on to make drip paintings.

What makes it interesting to Luis Ortiz, the Douglas Elliman broker who has the listing. is the address.

Veins bulge from a wasp-waisted candle holder, while sinuous flow-lines run down the side of a teacup, splitting to merge seamlessly with the faceted saucer beneath. It looks like a colony of mutant lifeforms has scuttled into Harrods’ interiors department, which can only mean one thing: Zaha Hadid has taken on homewares.

At the age of 63, the Iraqi-born architect has won every prize going, graced international power lists and erected buildings across the globe – and now she’s making a bid for your dining table.

American installation artist Robert Irwin will create a major piece for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, the foundation announced on Thursday.

The project has been in the works for 13 years, Irwin said.

"I'm not going to count my chickens before they hatch," he joked. "I'll believe it when I see it."

He'll have to wait a couple of years until then. Construction on the installation will begin next year and isn't slated to be completed until 2016.

Today, Frieze announced the 20 artists who will contribute work to its free sculpture park, on view for the run of both Frieze London and Frieze Masters from October 15 through 19. Curated by Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Director of Programs, Clare Lilley, the Regent’s Park display includes work by Yayoi Kusama, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Thomas Schütte, among others.

“Unique in the world’s art fairs, this year’s Frieze Sculpture Park is an intriguing and delightful breath of fresh air featuring artists from across three generations,” Clare Lilley said in a statement.

A monumental Fencai Imperial Qing Dynasty vase auctioned for $24.7 million at Skinner last night, setting a record as the top grossing lot ever sold in New England, and topping all sales of Qing Dynasty vases in the U.S. The Skinner "Asian Works of Art" auction coincides with Asia Week, and this vase has surpassed all other objects sold during the event to date.

An intensely focused and enthusiastic crowd packed the auction room, and most rose to their feet as the vase soared past the $10 million mark. After spirited bidding from multiple bidders present in the room and participating by phone, the hammer fell to a round of applause.

The iconic poppy at Marimekko blossomed to gigantic proportions and the prospect of a new Guggenheim museum summoned top architects to the Finnish capital last week. The 10-day Helsinki Design Week, which takes place every September, turns the entire city into a showcase for new ideas and Scandinavian interior style.

This year, the city hosted over 150 official events and another 100 fringe ones. Teurastamo, formerly a slaughterhouse, was the newest venue where young Finnish designers had the chance to show off their work.

The textiles historian Terry Satsuki Milhaupt had nearly finished her comprehensive book on kimonos when she committed suicide in 2012. Her widower, Curtis J. Milhaupt, heroically completed her work, “Kimono: A Modern History” (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press), and a show of the same title, based on her scholarship, opens on Sept. 27 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and runs through Jan. 24.

Mr. Milhaupt, a law professor at Columbia, said in an interview that when the book galleys finally arrived, “I burst into tears, mostly from relief.”

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes on Thursday signaled that he is viewing the value of the Detroit Institute of the Arts through the lens of the Detroit's future as the city works to emerge from Chapter 9 bankruptcy.

Rhodes asked Annmarie Erickson, executive vice president of the museum, how valuable the museum is to the education of children, to the social enjoyment of families who visit the museum, and for southeast Michigan as a whole.

Russian socialite and art collector Dasha Zhukova announced that the new Garage Museum of Contemporary Art will open in Moscow in June 2015. The Garage, which was founded in 2008 by Zhukova and her billionaire boyfriend Roman Abramovich, is currently located in a temporary, Shigeru Ban-designed building in Gorky Park. The institution features an extensive program of exhibitions, events, education, research, and publishing that focuses on current developments in Russian and international culture, creating opportunities for public dialogue, as well as the production of new work and ideas in Moscow. The museum’s collection is the first archive in the country related to the development of Russian contemporary art from the 1950s through the present.

The new space, which is in the same neighborhood as the museum’s current location, is being designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).

Detectives from the German Federal Criminal Police seized a trove of forged paintings; complete with forged provenance documents and receipts, as well as jewelery and other valuables in a coordinated raid across six German states last June - According to Der Hessische Rundfunk. Investigators into the illegal ring believe that the artworks were painted in forgery studios that were based in Russia and Israel and then shipped to Germany for sale. This information was obtained during two simultaneous raids in Switzerland and Israel.

Some 15 months after Police uncovered the international art forgery ring, German state prosecutors have officially charged two men with the crimes, "Der Spiegel" reported.