Chicago is a city of architecture and art. A monumental Cubist sculpture created in 1967 by Pablo Picasso stands in Daley Plaza in front of City Hall. It is a perennial favorite with tourists. Photo by J. Crocker, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
CHICAGO (AP) – Artists and non-profit arts groups are eligible to apply for grant money from the city of Chicago.
The city’s Community Arts Assistance Program offers grants of up to $1,000 for professional, artistic and organizational development projects. Artists from all disciplines and experience levels can apply. They have to be residents of Chicago for at least six months prior to the application deadline on Jan. 30.
Chicago nonprofit arts groups can apply if their budgets are less than $150,000.
City arts officials say the goal of the program is to discover, nurture and expand Chicago’s arts community.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Chicago is a city of architecture and art. A monumental Cubist sculpture created in 1967 by Pablo Picasso stands in Daley Plaza in front of City Hall. It is a perennial favorite with tourists. Photo by J. Crocker, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
Palazzo Vecchio, which overlooks piazza della Signoria, serves as a town hall in Florence, Italy. Image by Georges Jansoone. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
ROME (AFP) – Italian police on Wednesday raided Florence’s most famous palace over allegations that the search for a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece is damaging a fresco believed to have been painted over it.
“Police have visited the scene and have closely examined the fresco, as well as speaking to restorers,” Marco Agnoletti, a spokesman from Florence’s city council, which is based in the same building, the Palazzo Vecchio, told AFP.
The last reference to Da Vinci’s unfinished Battle of Anghiari was in the 16th century—but Florence’s top art authority believes it is hidden behind a fresco by Giorgio Vasari and launched a controversial project to find it.
Da Vinci began the work in 1505 and Vasari painted his fresco in 1563.
San Diego University art historian Maurizio Seracini, who was featured in Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code, is leading the project.
National Geographic, which has reportedly paid $250,000 for exclusivity on any findings from the research, is also taking part.
Reseachers bored holes into the Vasari work in the hope that tiny cameras would confirm San Diego art historian Maurizio Seracini’s theory that the Renaissance artist’s bloodthirsty depiction of warfare is hidden underneath.
The technology used in the project was developed by a senior U.S. nuclear physisist, Robert Smither, who came up with a special camera to generate high-resolution images of a cancer’s location in the human body.
Seracini is convinced that Vasari covered Da Vinci’s work with a wall before painting on top—and even left a clue on his own work with an inscription that reads “Cerca Trova” (“Seek and You Shall Find”).
The police investigation was launched after 400 international art world scholars signed a petition complaining that the search was nothing more than a “Dan-Brown style” publicity stunt which risked damaging Vasari’s fresco.
“It’s up to the police now to see whether the project workers have vandalised Vasari’s fresco in their rush to discover the Da Vinci,” said Maria Grazia Vernuccio, from the national heritage association Italia Nostra.
She said the Italian culture ministry had stepped in on Monday to halt the project as fears spread that the researchers would not stop at boring holes but “suggested they may tear bits of the fresco away as well.”
Tomaso Montanari, history professor at the University of Naples, said there was “no way Vasari would have painted over Da Vinci’s work. He held him in great esteem, and removed works from walls rather than paint over them.”
“This whole thing is more like the search for the Holy Grail than real history. We don’t even know if the written clue is from the right period, it’s a publicity plot,” he said.
Montanari helped circulate the petition asking Florence’s mayor, Matteo Renzi—who has championed the project—to stop the drilling.
“Renzi realised that Leonardo is a superstar, any work by him becomes an immediate blockbuster. But even if the painting really was there, it would be in ruins. Do you destroy a Vasari to get to the dregs of a Leonardo?” he said.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Palazzo Vecchio, which overlooks piazza della Signoria, serves as a town hall in Florence, Italy. Image by Georges Jansoone. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Portrait of Rue McClanahan by John Curran, pastel on paper, inscribed ‘To Rue’ signed John Curran lower right, matted and framed, 31 x 26 1/2 inches, together with documents and a photograph of McClanahan with artist. Estimate: $1,000-$1,500. Image courtesy of Hutter Auction Galleries.
NEW YORK – Choice items from the estate of Emmy Award-winning actress Rue McClanahan will star in Hutter Auction Galleries’ Fine and Decorative Arts Estates Auction on Saturday, Dec. 17. Offered will be scripts and costumes from the hit TV series Golden Girls, in which McClanahan played Blanche Devereaux, an oversexed Southern belle living with her three senior lady friends in Miami.
The auction will be conducted at Hutter’s gallery in the Cirkers Art Storage warehouse at 444 W. 55th St. (between Ninth and 10th avenues) in Manhattan and will begin at 11 a.m. Eastern. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding.
Furnishings from McClanahan’s apartment on East 56th Street will also be sold along with items from a 110 Central Park South Apartment, including jewelry and other collectibles.
“As we suspected there is a lot of interest in her costumes from Golden Girls. As they say, she was a floozy,” said Adam Hutter of Hutter Auction Galleries.
Several of the costumes were designed by Judy Davis, who won a prime-time Emmy Award in 1989 for costume design for Beauty and the Beast.
One of the Golden Girls costumes is a cream and black silk dressing robe and gown that Blanche wore in several episodes. This flowing outfit has a $500-$700 estimate and comes with a still photo and DVD of McClanahan wearing the costume on the set.
One of the scripts for sale is titled The Burglary, episode 003 and dated July 22, 1985. The cover is inscribed, “To Rue,” and signed by McClanahan’s costars Bea Arthur, Betty White and Estell Getty. It has a $400-$600 estimate.
The auction even has McClanahan’s 1990s driver’s license—on which she fibbed about her year of birth by a few years.
The sale also includes handwritten journals by McClanahan and costume jewelry she wore.
For details visit Hutter’s website at www.hutterauctions.com or phone 212-247-4791.
Portrait of Rue McClanahan by John Curran, pastel on paper, inscribed ‘To Rue’ signed John Curran lower right, matted and framed, 31 x 26 1/2 inches, together with documents and a photograph of McClanahan with artist. Estimate: $1,000-$1,500. Image courtesy of Hutter Auction Galleries.
‘Golden Girls’ costume, season 3, episodes 14/18/19 and season 5, episode 9, cream and black silk dressing robe with black lace three-quarter sleeve and cream silk gown, handmade by the show’s costume designer Judy Evans, together with still and DVD of Rue wearing the costume. Estimate: $500-$700. Image courtesy of Hutter Auction Galleries.
Jaguar form costume jewelry bracelet, gilt metal and rhinestones with one green eye, with certificate of authenticity from the estate of Rue McClanahan. Estimate: $300-$500. Image courtesy of Hutter Auction Galleries.
‘Golden Girls’ script ‘The Burglary’ #003, dated July 22, 1985, cover inscribed ‘To Rue,’ signed by Estelle Getty, Bea Arthur and Betty White. Estimate: $400-$600. Image courtesy of Hutter Auction Galleries.
Rue McClanahan personal letter, two-sided in pencil on off-white paper, dated Oct. 28 and 29, 1957, signed ‘love, Rue,’ about her theater roles and current event, with original 8 x 10 black and white portrait from 1957. Estimate: $400-$600. Image courtesy of Hutter Auction Galleries.
A street in Jerusalem’s Old City. Photo by Nagillum, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
JERUSALEM (AP) – Mysterious stone carvings made thousands of years ago and recently uncovered in an excavation underneath Jerusalem have archaeologists stumped.
Israeli diggers who uncovered a complex of rooms carved into the bedrock in the oldest section of the city recently found the markings: Three “V” shapes cut next to each other into the limestone floor of one of the rooms, about 2 inches (5 centimeters) deep and 20 inches (50 centimeters) long. There were no finds to offer any clues pointing to the identity of who made them or what purpose they served.
The archaeologists in charge of the dig know so little that they have been unable even to posit a theory about their nature, said Eli Shukron, one of the two directors of the dig.
“The markings are very strange, and very intriguing. I’ve never seen anything like them,” Shukron said.
The shapes were found in a dig known as the City of David, a politically sensitive excavation conducted by Israeli government archaeologists and funded by a nationalist Jewish group under the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in east Jerusalem. The rooms were unearthed as part of the excavation of fortifications around the ancient city’s only natural water source, the Gihon spring.
It is possible, the dig’s archaeologists say, that when the markings were made at least 2,800 years ago the shapes might have accommodated some kind of wooden structure that stood inside them, or they might have served some other purpose on their own. They might have had a ritual function or one that was entirely mundane. Archaeologists faced by a curious artifact can usually at least venture a guess about its nature, but in this case no one, including outside experts consulted by Shukron and the dig’s co-director, archaeologists with decades of experience between them, has any idea.
There appears to be at least one other ancient marking of the same type at the site. A century-old map of an expedition led by the British explorer Montague Parker, who searched for the lost treasures of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem between 1909 and 1911, includes the shape of a “V” drawn in an underground channel not far away. Modern archaeologists haven’t excavated that area yet.
Ceramic shards found in the rooms indicate they were last used around 800 B.C., with Jerusalem under the rule of Judean kings, the dig’s archaeologists say. At around that time, the rooms appear to have been filled with rubble to support the construction of a defensive wall.
It is unclear, however, whether they were built in the time of those kings or centuries earlier by the Canaanite residents who predated them.
The purpose of the complex is part of the riddle. The straight lines of its walls and level floors are evidence of careful engineering, and it was located close to the most important site in the city, the spring, suggesting it might have had an important function.
A unique find in a room beside the one with the markings _ a stone like a modern grave marker, which was left upright when the room was filled in _ might offer a clue. Such stones were used in the ancient Middle East as a focal point for ritual or a memorial for dead ancestors, the archaeologists say, and it is likely a remnant of the pagan religions which the city’s Israelite prophets tried to eradicate. It is the first such stone to be found intact in Jerusalem excavations.
But the ritual stone does not necessarily mean the whole complex was a temple. It might simply have marked a corner devoted to religious practice in a building whose purpose was commonplace.
With the experts unable to come up with a theory about the markings, the City of David dig posted a photo on its Facebook page and solicited suggestions. The results ranged from the thought-provoking – “a system for wood panels that held some other item,” or molds into which molten metal would could have been poured – to the fanciful: ancient Hebrew or Egyptian characters, or a “symbol for water, particularly as it was near a spring.”
The City of David dig, where the carvings were found, is the most high-profile and politically contentious excavation in the Holy Land. Named for the biblical monarch thought to have ruled from the spot 3,000 years ago, the dig is located in what today is east Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel in 1967. Palestinians claim that part of the city as the capital of a future state.
The dig is funded by Elad, an organization affiliated with the Israeli settlement movement. The group also moves Jewish families into the neighborhood and elsewhere in east Jerusalem in an attempt to render impossible any division of the city in a future peace deal.
Palestinians and some Israeli archaeologists have criticized the dig for what they say is an excessive focus on Jewish remains. The dig’s archaeologists, who work under the auspices of the government’s Israel Antiquities Authority, deny that charge.
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Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
A street in Jerusalem’s Old City. Photo by Nagillum, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
