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Filled with wonders, Marco Polo's tales are the first European account of the Silk Road. But, 700 years after the famed Venetian merchant and explorer's death, can they be trusted? Can a man who claimed to have seen a unicorn in the Indonesian island of Sumatra be trusted? This and other similarly valid questions have cast doubt on the truthfulness of Marco Polo since the 14th Century, when his book The Travels of Marco Polo became a bestseller and was translated into dozens of languages, hand-copied in countless manuscripts and available at any lavish court in Europe. Polo's tales are...

Rhapsody in Blue | 17:14The Bobs - Topic | 851 subscribers | 1,957 views | October 19, 2015

Scholars have in fact long debated whether or not the painting is a Raphael original... a new method of analysis based on an AI algorithm has sided with those who think at least some of the strokes were at the hand of another artist.Researchers from the UK and US developed a custom analysis algorithm based on the works that we know are the result of the Italian master's brushwork...Machine learning processes typically need to be trained on a vast pool of examples, something which isn't always available when it comes to a sole artist's life work. In this case, the...

Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. (Credit: Wiki Commons.)ROME - For the first time since 1983, all ten of Raphael’s grand tapestries depicting the lives of Saints Peter and Paul will be exhibited together in the Sistine Chapel, hanging at eye level beneath Michelangelo’s frescoed ceiling as was the original intention. Scheduled to be on display Feb. 17-23, 2020, this will be the Vatican’s way of honoring the famous Renaissance master as the world marks the 500th anniversary of his death. The last time they were presented was for the 500th anniversary of his birth. The artist, who died in...

A painting once believed to be a $25 copy caught the eye of an art historian during the filming of a new BBC series — and turned out to be a $26 million Raphael. The Madonna composition had been covered in dirt and hanging above a door in the dusty corner of a room in the Haddo House, one of the National Trust for Scotland’s 18th-century homes in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. “I thought, crikey, it looks like a Raphael,” the historian, Bendor Grosvenor, told The Guardian. “It was very dirty, under old varnish, which goes yellow.”

People view one of Raphael's tapestries hanging from a wall of the Sistine Chapel July 14. (CNS photo) By Carol GlatzCatholic News Service VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Like long-lost twins, two halves of an artistic masterpiece conceived by the Renaissance master Raphael will be reunited for the first time. The Vatican Museums and London's Victoria and Albert Museum will exhibit side-by-side some of Raphael's enormous tapestries for the Sistine Chapel and his preparatory paintings. The joint initiative is meant to coincide with Pope Benedict XVI's first visit to the United Kingdom in September. Since the Renaissance, "the cartoons and...

Is British National Gallery's New Raphael a Fake? Feb.20, 2004 LONDON (Reuters) - A Raphael painting bought by Britain's National Gallery this month for $41.7 million is a fake, a U.S. art professor says. The gallery secured the "Madonna of the Pinks," which it called the most significant Old Master in any British collection, after a fight to keep it in the country. But James Beck, Professor of Art History at Columbia University in New York and the President of ArtWatch International, told Friday's edition of the Times the gallery had paid "a record price for a fake." "They haven't...

Earlier this year, a 40-year debate over a painting known as the de Brécy Tondo was settled thanks to artificial intelligence–based facial recognition software, with the painting now considered to have likely been the famed Renaissance artist Raphael. Now, that painting has gone on public display for the first time at the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford, England. For years, the de Brécy Tondo was assumed to be a copy of a work by Raphael made in the Victorian era, in large part because of its resemblance to his Sistine Madonna altarpiece. Hassan Ugail, a professor at the University...

I, Harambe, saw this viral video the other day about the "12 Days of Christmas" gifts ALL being birds and I decided I had to do a little digging because the Not the Bee folks need to know about this. It's always been a joke about the song that after 4 days of birds, it must have been a relief to get the five golden rings. Except, according to some theories, EVERY gift in the 12 days of Christmas is a different bird. The song was originally written in a children's book called Mirth Without Mischief way back in the...

Who consists of Russia's Vertical Of Power and how negative selection has doomed Russia? Transcript you know what's the best thing I love about tashkin people at tashkin breakfast club 0:09 our community every single person there is intellectually pleasing to speak to I 0:16 call them the cream of the crob of Russia um they are all the process of 0:24 negative selection that's been going on in Russia affecting Russia for a long 0:29 time for over 100 years now perhaps even for centuries in this live stream will 0:36 Zero in the last 25 years as they...

On this date in 1531, a Welsh nobleman whose grandfather had been instrumental in raising the Tudor dynasty up caught the downswing of the Tudor dynasty’s axe. Gruffydd ap Rhys ap Thomas (“son of Rhys, son of Thomas”) was the Welsh patriarch of an illustrious house who had taken the Lancastrian side during the English Wars of the Roses. When the Lancastrians lost, he took the necessary oaths to the likes of Richard III but his reputed promise to defend Wales for his king with such ferocity that an invader must needs “make his entrance and irruption over my belly”...

... The website coincides with a study from the team published in the journal Antiquity, which investigates the inhabitants of the hospital of St. John the Evangelist. Founded around 1195, this institution helped the "poor and infirm," housing a dozen or so inmates at any one time. It lasted for some 300 years before being replaced by St. John's College in 1511. The site was excavated in 2010. "Like all medieval towns, Cambridge was a sea of need," said Robb. "A few of the luckier poor people got bed and board in the hospital for life. Selection criteria would have...

More than 500,000 years ago, our human ancestors used large, stone tools known as "Acheulean handaxes," to cut meat and wood, and dig for tubers. Often made from flint, these prehistoric oval and pear-shaped tools are flaked on both sides and have a pointed end.Handaxes have long been a source of fascination in our social and cultural history. Prior to the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, people thought that they were of natural origin and referred to them as "thunderstones shot from the clouds," according to texts, with the earliest records dating back to the mid-1500s.But researchers from...

This week in October marks the anniversary of an epic event that is not widely known except among history buffs, but which nonetheless dramatically shaped the future of the Western world, and which may still hold inspiration for us in the West today.After the death of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in 632, Islam spread like a bloody tide throughout the Arabian peninsula, north to the Caspian Sea and east through Persia and beyond, westward through Egypt and across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. From there it crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and consumed virtually all of...

The earliest known example of a European cannon was found off the coast of Sweden, near Marstrand, in 2001. The discovery and the age of the artifact have been recently revealed. Handheld guns, known as hand cannon, have been discovered from about the same era.Gunpowder started being mentioned in European documents about 1300. The Chinese had been experimenting with precursors of gunpowder and had some primitive firearms a bit before 1300, as documented in the book “Gunpowder” by Jack Kelly.Military technology has high incentives and travels fast. While mentions of European uses of gunpowder and guns have been found in...

In 1678, a Chaldean priest from Baghdad reached the Imperial Villa of Potosí, the world’s richest silver-mining camp and at the time the world’s highest city at more than 4,000 metres (13,100 feet) above sea level. A regional capital in the heart of the Bolivian Andes, Potosí remains – more than three and a half centuries later – a mining city today. Its baroque church towers stand watch as ore trucks rumble into town, hauling zinc and lead ores for export to Asia. Elias al-Mûsili – or Don Elias of Mosul, as he was known – arrived in 17th-century Potosí...

Building the Walls of Constantinople | 11:35toldinstone | 421K subscribers | 79,760 views | September 15, 2023

Consider Michelangelo’s famous “Creation of Adam,” Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” or Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” When you think of Western art’s grand visual narratives of humanity’s inception — and all its triumphs, beauty, tragedies and meaning — they likely look very White. This is because, for centuries, the artistic traditions of the European Renaissance have been the authority of such themes. It was from the 15th to 16th century that “art came to be seen as a branch of knowledge,” according to Britannica, “valuable in its own right and capable of providing man with images of...

An international research team led by maritime archaeologist Staffan von Arbin of the University of Gothenburg has studied what might be Europe's oldest shipboard cannon. The cannon was found in the sea off Marstrand on the Swedish west coast and dates back to the 14th century. The findings from the interdisciplinary study contribute new knowledge about the early development of artillery on land and at sea, but also bears witness to a troubled period for seafarers as well as coastal populations. The small, muzzle-loading cast copper-alloy cannon, found by a recreational diver at a depth of 20 metres in the...

Caravaggio was known for his revolutionary way of playing with light in his paintings and, amongst other things, allegedly killing a man over a game of tennis. While that may sound like disparate facts, they entwine bizarrely in The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, the only painting Caravaggio ever deigned to sign, work that held a clue supposedly confessing to murder. Caravaggio revolutionised the use of chiaroscuro, wherein light dictates the viewers’ focus. Bright shafts of light make figures rise up out of the canvas, and imposing shadows condemn others to the background. This sense of hiding in the...