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
Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis XIV
One of the first things seven-year-old Louis XIV did as France's King was to give away a set of exquisite medieval tapestries. As an adult, the Sun King wouldn't make the same mistake. During his 72-year-reign, Louis XIV amassed history's largest tapestry collection, a staggering 2,650 plus pieces. Only England's Henry VIII came close. To mark the 300th anniversary of Louis' death, fifteen of his treasures unfurl for "Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis XIV" at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (December 15 through May 1, 2016). Most of the tapestries have traveled from Paris's Mobilier National, repository for 600 of the roughly 700 surviving pieces of the royal collection. Located in Paris's 13th arrondissement, the little-known institution furnishes the Élysée Palace, ministries, and embassies. Created in weaving workshops across northern Europe, the featured tapestries date from about 1540 to 1715. Eleven are making their U.S. debut; two recently underwent conservation Read More