Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

Jan. 21, 2012: An artifact returned by Italy to Libya, known as the Head Domitilla, which was stolen from Sabratha, Libya in 1990, is seen on display during Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti's visit to Tripoli, Libya.

From the Associate Press

Italy has returned to Libyathe head of a 2,000 year-old statue that was smuggled out of the country in the 1960s.

Prime Minister Mario Monti gave the sculpted head of Domitilla Minor, the daughter of Roman emperor Vespasian, to Libyan authorities during his trip to Tripoli on Saturday.

The sculpture was taken from Libya’s northwestern city of Sabratha in the 1960s, and recently auctioned at Christie’s.

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Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's Auction House, stands next to a model of the Titanic, during a press conference and preview of Titanic artifacts on Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012 in New York. The complete collection of artifacts recovered from the wreck site of the RMS Titanic will be auctioned by Guernsey's Auction House in April. Photo by Bebeto Matthews from The AP

By Kelly Shiers from The Herald News

The sale of more than 5,000 artifacts salvaged from the world’s most famous shipwreck is causing concerns for a local museum official.

Concerns serious enough the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic will never consider hosting the Titanic relics — even as a temporary exhibit.

“No maritime museum in the world that is part of the (International Congress of Maritime Museums) would display any of these items,” the museum’s registrar Lynn-Marie Richard said in a recent interview.

The recovered objects from the ship are set to be sold to the highest bidder, almost a century after the unsinkable vessel sank after hitting an iceberg, taking more than 1,500 passengers and crew to an icy grave in the North Atlantic.

The New York City auction has captured worldwide attention. Its very existence possible only after years of legal wrangling that now allows RMS Titanic Inc. to sell the incredible collection including a mesh purse, sunglasses, a bronze cherub that once adorned the ocean liner’s grand staircase, china and jewelry.

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Workers excavate a 1,700-year old brick tomb in China's Jiangsu province. But often thieves get there first, sometimes just bulldozing their way in. Photo by the AP

By Tania Branigan from theguardian

China’s extraordinary historical treasures are under threat from increasingly aggressive and sophisticated tomb raiders, who destroy precious archaeological evidence as they swipe irreplaceable relics.

The thieves use dynamite and even bulldozers to break into the deepest chambers – and night vision goggles and oxygen canisters to search them. The artefacts they take are often sold on within days to international dealers.

Police have already stepped up their campaign against the criminals and the government is devoting extra resources to protecting sites and tracing offenders. This year it set up a national information centre to tackle such crimes.

Tomb theft is a global problem that has gone on for centuries. But the sheer scope of China’s heritage – with thousands of sites, many of them in remote locations – poses a particular challenge.

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The Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum incorporates 3-D technology to document the designer’s 50-year career.

By Suzy Menkes from The New York Times

“To be called pioneers for what we have done — and at our age!” says Giancarlo Giammetti, referring to the opening this week of the Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum.

A legion of models in the designer’s signature “Valentino red” act as an online teaser for a downloadable desktop application at http://valentino-garavani-archives.org. It was designed to go live during a news conference being given by Mr. Giammetti and Mr. Garavani, longtime partners both in their late 70s. The news conference will be live-streamed from New York on Monday.

Instead of the static exhibitions in brick-and-mortar museums so familiar to fashion icons, the Valentino duo has used immersive 3-D technology to present archives spanning 50 years, including nearly 100 fashion shows on video, 5,000 dresses, the original working sketches from the designer’s hand and photographs of the clothes, the celebrities who wore them and a vision of the world of Valentino.

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Image by Corentin Fohlen for The New York Times

By Edward Rothstein from The New York Times

You walk through a garden lush with overgrowth, a cultivated wilderness with exotic grasses gone deliberately to seed. Inside the effect is the same: You enter the eerily atmospheric hall where you meander past artifacts from Oceania, Africa and other realms beyond Europe’s borders, as speckled daylight seeps through window scrims decorated with forest foliage. The displays are lush with miscellany: here, an ivory statuette of a goddess from the Tonga islands that once was shown in an 18th-century curiosity cabinet; there, a desiccated human skull, covered in black-colored beeswax, acquired in early-20th-century Papua New Guinea.

But wait: before trying to decipher this strange universe, at the Musée du Quai Branly, consider another, elsewhere in Paris. Only here the impression is of vast, arching spaces and skylights that cast no shadows. You readily recognize the iconography of church portals, pilasters and statuary. It looks as if entire facades had been amputated from cathedrals all over France in a wild species of plunder. Here are the intricately ornamented arches of a 12th-century church in Saintes; there, ornate 16th-century doors from the cathedral of Aix-en-Provence. Centuries of grotesque, open-mouthed gargoyles are poised on a wall overhead, as if prepared to spew venomous rainwater.

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