A long-lost masterpiece by Antonio Canova (1757-1822), found in 2002 when it was sold at a garden centre auction for £5,200, is now worth between a staggering £5 million and £8million. 200 years a after its completion, the sculpture will be put up for auction again this summer at Christie’s.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has announced that they will be deaccessioning a bronze sculpture in their collection, which will be sold at Christie’s this May. Whilst the estimate of the work is only available upon request, it is anticipated that it could fetch around $30 million, which would make it by far the highest valued object the museum has ever sold.
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For the very first time, tens of thousands of Timbuktu’s ancient manuscripts have been captured in a virtual gallery called ‘Mali Magic’. Collectively the documents represent centuries of African and Islamic scholarship, as well as remarkable manuscript artwork.
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The abandoned vessel of legendary explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) was one of the greatest undiscovered shipwrecks in recent history. Lost for 107 years, the Endurance had sunk 3,008 meters beneath the Antarctic Sea. A team of scientists finally found the wreck, looking just as it did the day it vanished over a century ago.
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On 23 March, Europe’s first NFT advisory service and physical gallery – Quantus Gallery – will open its doors to the public. The gallery, which will display its collection for sale on Samsung TV screens, aims to guide collectors through the tricky process of identifying good investments in the NFT art world.
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Last week, Belgium handed over a list of 84,000 artifacts of Congolese origin to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the first step in the process of restitution of objects from the colonial period. The items are held in the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, an institution with one of the largest collections of African objects in the world which was established at the end of the nineteenth century.
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Archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) have unearthed the largest Roman mosaic to be found in the city in more than half a century. The discovery was made around a month ago on the building site for a new development in Southwark, just in view of the iconic Shard.
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In the early hours of 7 November 1980, the notorious art thief ‘Erik the Belgian’ stole six Flemish tapestries from a church in northern Spain. Whilst most were recovered later by Interpol, a fragment of one of the tapestries was feared lost until recently.
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Last week, Unit Gallery in London opened a pioneering new exhibition titled ‘Eternalizing Art History: From Da Vinci to Modigliani’, featuring six NFTs from major Italian museums. The objects exhibited are authorized digital copies shown on screens and mounted in handmade replicas of the original frames. The buyer of the works receives both the physical components (the screen, a built-in drive that generates the image, the replica frame and a certificate of authenticity) as well as the digital elements (the NFT and a unique login to the app).
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On Valentine’s Day, Gustav Klimt’s (1862-1918) world-famous ‘The Kiss’ joined the metaverse – a network of 3D virtual worlds. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna celebrated the day of love by giving art fans the chance to own a non-fungible token (NFT) of the romantic painting.
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