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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By Carlos Boettcher from ABC News

Thieves executed a brazen early-morning burglary of Greece’s largest art museum Monday, making off with three works, including one by the 20th-century master Pablo Picasso.

The burglars were able to take advantage of the National Art Gallery’s soft security, which was short-staffed because of striking workers, officials said.

Greece, beset by riots, strikes and economic pressure, has had to make numerous cuts in the public sector, including museum security.

The heist was successful thanks to a combination of planning, patience and timing, officials said. Alarms were intentionally set off numerous times Sunday, leading the guards to disable at least one of the alarms, providing the thieves easy entrance through a balcony door.

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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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From The China Post

Madrid’s top three museums — the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza — received a record number of visitors last year as blockbuster exhibits drew crowds despite a weak economy.

The private Thyssen-Bornemisza, which displays works by artists ranging from El Greco to Picasso, posted the biggest rise in visitor numbers of the three museums that make up the Spanish capital’s so-called “Golden Triangle of Art.”

It drew 1,070,390 visitors, a 30.4 percent jump over the previous year and the biggest number since the museum opened its doors in 1992.

The rise is due to the success of the seven temporary exhibits it held last year, longer opening hours and an increase in the number of visitors to Madrid, the museum’s director general Miguel Angel Recio said.

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Photo by Roland Halbe

From dezeen magazine

Cavernous holes in the courtyard of three museum buildings in Graz, Austria, lead underground into a new, shared entrance by Spanish architects Nieto Sobejano and local firm eep architekten

The extension adds a conference hall, reading areas and an archive to the Joanneum Museum complex, which comprises a regional library, an art gallery and a natural history museum.

Glass surrounds the conical openings and each one tunnels down through one or two storeys to bring diffused natural light into the underground rooms.

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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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Steve Jobs

From MarketWatch

The Computer History Museum (CHM), the world’s leading institution exploring the history of computing and its ongoing impact on society, today announced the launch of a new online exhibit on legendary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Called “Steve Jobs… First, Last, One more thing…” the exhibit traces Jobs’s life from his youth building ‘Blue Boxes’ with partner Steve Wozniak — devices that allowed its user to make free telephone calls — to head of the world’s biggest company.

The exhibit features rare footage of Jobs from 1980 speaking about the early days of Apple. “We had no idea what people would do with these things,” Jobs says in the video, describing the 1977 Apple II computer that launched Apple into a major technology company.

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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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Recovered stone heads, ancient Roman artifacts, are seen on display in Tripoli. Image by Abdel Magid al-Fergany

From Times of Malta

Muammar Gaddafi’s forces tried to flee Tripoli with ancient Roman artefacts in hopes of selling them abroad to help fund their doomed fight, Libya’s new leaders said today, as they displayed the recovered objects for the first time.

The director of the state antiquities department, Saleh Algabe, hailed the find of 17 pieces, mostly small stone heads, as an important recovery of national treasures.

The pieces included a female figurine evocative of ancient fertility symbols, several small stone human heads and two ornate terracotta fragments.

Mr Algabe said the figurines were likely used in pagan worship and dated back to the second and third centuries AD, when a swathe of North Africa belonged to the Roman Empire.

He said the pieces were seized from a car on the road to Tripoli’s airport in August as revolutionary forces were sweeping into the capital.

It appeared Gaddafi’s forces wanted to smuggle the items out of the country and sell them at auction to fund their fight, he said. Officials did not know how much the objects were worth.

The pieces probably do not represent a major component of Libya’s wealth of artefacts from the Roman era. Still, officials played up their recovery as significant.

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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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