For centuries, an unsigned portrait of a beautiful young woman at Rome's Galleria Borghese remained shrouded in mystery. Now a focus exhibition at San Francisco's Legion of Honor, Sublime Beauty: Raphael's "Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn" brings the enigmatic teenager to the U.S. for the first time with a new theory about her identity (January 9 to April 10). "Inexplicably magnetic, it stops you in its tracks," says Esther Bell, the show's organizer and curator of European Painting at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "It's a beautifully balanced painting and one of Raphael's most beautiful portraits." First recorded in the Borghese collection in 1682, "Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn" was misattributed to a number of artists, including Pietro Perugino and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Further clouding matters, in the mid-17th century, an unknown artist changed the sitter into St. Catherine, covering her bare shoulders with a cloak and replacing the small unicorn in her lap Read More
Catherine the Great: “Glutton” or Connoisseur?
After wresting power from her husband, Catherine the Great ruled Russia for 34 years, styling herself as the heir to her westernizing grandfather-in-law Peter the Great. In parallel with military campaigns that added large parts of Poland and the Crimean Peninsula to Russia's Empire, the German-born Tsarina waged a cultural offensive, buying Western art by the boatload. The Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace in Summer, from across the Neva River, St Petersburg Photo: Andrey Terebenin With her first acquisition in 1764 -- some 300 canvases earmarked for political rival Frederick the Great of Prussia -- Catherine II founded the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. On the heels of the museum's 250th birthday, over 450 of her art works star in "Masterpieces of the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great" at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia through November 8. Organized by Mikhail Dedinkin, deputy head of the Hermitage's department of Western Read More
Theatre of the World: Vienna’s New Chamber of Art
Saliera, Benvenuto Cellini, 1540-43, gold, enamel ©Wien, Kunsthistorisches Museum During the late 16th century, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II turned Prague into Europe’s cultural capital, amassing the greatest art collection of his day. Cost was no object and he invited the best goldsmiths, stone carvers, and clock makers to his court. Rudolf kept the treasures inside Hradcany Castle in a chamber of art, or Kunstkammer, a highly personal reflection of his world view. Today, Rudolf’s prized possessions along with those of his art-loving Habsburg relatives reside at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. After a decade long closure, the museum’s refurbished Kunstkammer reopened March 1. Though the museum itself is lavishly decorated by famous artists including Gustav Klimt, and crowned with an ornate cupola, nothing prepares you for this 20-room embarrassment of riches. The “museum within a museum” features a dizzying 2,200 objects arranged chronologically -- from the late Read More