Displaying items by tag: michelangelo

“Picturing Mary” is the most ambitious exhibition mounted by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in years, and given its subject — images of the Virgin Mary — it is likely to be one of its most popular as well. It opens in the middle of the Christmas season, when the subject of Mary is particularly resonant, and it includes more than 60 works, some of them by the most celebrated artists of the Renaissance and baroque eras, including Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio and Dürer. If this show, which opens Friday, doesn’t fill the museum’s galleries with throngs of visitors, nothing will.

The subject is vast, and doing it justice in one exhibition is impossible. One might organize such a show based on the archetypal narrative moments in Mary’s life — the Annunciation, the Pieta, the Assumption — that have inspired artists for centuries.

High above the altar in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, the halo around Jesus Christ's head in Michelangelo's famous frescoes shines with a brighter glow, thanks to a revolutionary new lighting system.

Angels, sybils and prophets in blues, pinks and golds, once lost in the gloom, are brought into sharp relief by 7,000 LED lamps designed specifically for the prized chapel, where red-hatted cardinals have elected new popes since the 15th century.

A state of the art ventilation system has also been installed to protect the frescoes from humidity, enabling up to 2,000 people at a time to safely visit one of the world's top tourist attractions, which draws over six million people a year.

In the world of art with paintings by Monet and Rembrandt, and sculpture by Michelangelo and Rodin, drawings sometimes play second fiddle.

Grand Rapids Art Museum hopes to show that's not really the case with a major exhibition of works on paper from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Drawings, watercolors and pastels from artists such as Picasso, Van Gogh and Jasper Johns go on display this fall in the exhibition titled "Marks of Genius: 100 Extraordinary Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts."

Life with Picasso was never easy, it seems, and neither was the €52 million renovation of Paris's Picasso Museum. After five years of delays and difficulties, culminating in a public quarrel and the firing of its president in May, the museum's reopening is finally set for the artist's birthday, Oct. 25. The public will get a preview of the new interiors, before the artworks are installed, on Sept 20-21. The renovation has doubled the public space, modernized outdated facilities and added a new entrance, a multimedia auditorium and a Cubist garden with geometric topiary trees.

The museum's 17th-century hôtel particulier was built in 1659 by Pierre Aubert, a financier and adviser to Louis XIV. He was also the salt tax collector, and his extravagant mansion was quickly nicknamed Hôtel Salé (salty). The majestic staircase, based on a plan by Michelangelo, is the centerpiece, with delicate ironwork banisters and a sumptuous array of sculpted garlands, cherubs and divinities.

The iconic statue of David by Michelangelo could crumble under the stress of its own weight because of "weak ankles" in the original construction of the masterpiece, warns  the National Research Council (CNR) and Geosciences Institute at the University of Florence.

Micro-fractures in its legs have appeared on the sculpture which weighs 5.5 tonnes and researchers in Florence have warned that it could collapse under its own weight. The ornamental tree stump carved behind David's right leg bears most of the statues weight and recent findings from the National Research Council show cracks.

The Vatican Museums will be installing a new landmark heating, ventilating, and air conditioning system for the Sistine  Chapel, specially designed to address the challenges of protecting Michelangelo’s masterpieces against deterioration. 

The Governate of the Vatican City State and Carrier on Wednesday said the new system is expected to be installed and  commissioned by the third quarter of 2014.

The new system, which replaces a Carrier system installed in the early 1990s, is designed to have twice the efficiency and three times the capacity of the previous system. 

Michelangelo's famous statue of the biblical figure David is at risk of collapse due to the weakening of the artwork's legs and ankles, according to a report published this week by art experts.

The findings, which were made public by Italy's National Research Council, show micro-fractures in the ankle and leg areas.

The "David" statue dates from the early 16th century and is housed in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. The results of the report were published this week in the Journal of Cultural Heritage, a publication devoted to research into the conservation of culturally significant works of art and buildings.

To commemorate the upcoming holiday, the National Gallery in London has selected paintings from its collection that when viewed together, tell the story of Easter. Works by Rembrandt, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Caravaggio, Diego Velázquez, and others recount the events leading up to Christ’s Crucifixion, which is known as the Passion, as well as his resurrection.

Located in Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery houses over 2,300 paintings from the 13th to the 19th centuries. Its collection belongs to the public of the UK. The museum is open seven days a week and offers free admission.

The Easter Story can also be viewed on the National Gallery’s website.

England’s Ashmolean Museum has acquired one of the most important Pre-Raphaelite paintings remaining in private hands. John Everett Millais’ (1829-1896) portrait of John Ruskin, the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, has been on loan to the institution since January 2012. The work was officially given to the museum by the Art Council England under the Acceptance in Lieu of Inheritance plan, which stipulates that under British tax law debts can be written off in exchange for objects of national significance. The painting recently appeared in Tate Britain’s highly successful exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde.

Millais, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, was commissioned to paint the portrait in 1853 by Ruskin himself. While working on the painting, Milliais fell in love with Ruskin’s wife, which ultimately led to the breakdown of the Ruskins’ marriage, Millais’ friendship with Ruskin, and the artist’s involvement with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. After marrying Ruskin’s wife, Effie, Millais gave the portrait to a friend in Oxford, Henry Wentworth Acland. The portrait remained in Acland’s family until his descendants sold it at Christie’s in 1965, where the late owner of the painting purchased it.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which formed in 1848, was a group of English painters, poets, and critics who rejected the traditional approaches to art and painting established by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael (1483-1520) and Michelangelo (1473-1564). Instead, the Pre-Raphaelites turned to medieval and early Renaissance art for inspiration often painting subjects from Shakespeare and the Bible. Pre-Raphaelitism, which rattled Britain from 1848 to 1900, was considered the country’s first avant-garde movement.

The Minneapolis Museum of Arts acquired a rare Renaissance bust of St. John the Baptist yesterday, May 8, 2013. Created by the Italian sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano (1474-1554), the terracotta bust was one of the works handpicked by Hitler to appear in his Führermuseum, which never came to fruition. The institution was expected to house a massive collection of the most important works of Western Art in the historical canon.

Rovezzano’s bust was bought from Theresia Willi Lanz by Hitler’s special representative, Hans Posse, who was in charge of traveling across Europe seizing important works from Jewish art collectors and buying them from non-Jewish collectors. After the Führermuseum was never realized, the bust was hidden along with a number of important works by Leonardo da Vinci (1542-1519), Vermeer (1632-1675), and Michelangelo (1475-1564) in a salt mine in Austria. As it became clear that the Nazis would not win World War II, Hitler’s officials called for the destruction of the mine. However, the miners from the Austrian town wished to keep their livelihood intact and worked to save the mines and the art inside by removing inactivated Nazi bombs and setting them off through controlled explosions within the tunnels of the mines, saving the salt and the art but making them inaccessible. The bust was ultimately returned to the Netherlands.

Rovezanno was one of the most prominent sculptors during the high Renaissance and his bust of St. John the Baptist is well known among Renaissance experts. Created in Florence during the time when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael (1483-1520) were working there, the bust is the earliest Renaissance sculpture in the Minneapolis Institute’s collection. The bust of St. John the Baptist will go on view in the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts permanent galleries alongside other renowned Renaissance busts by Agostino Zoppo (circa 1520-1572) and Giovanni Battista Caccini (1556-1613).