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Around noon in Rome today, an American tourist requested an audience with Pope Francis while visiting the Vatican’s Chiaramonti Museum. When his request was denied, the man, in his 50s, directed his ire at the nearest ancient bust—and sent it crashing to the floor. As the perpetrator tried to flee the scene, another sculpture was smashed in his wake.
“The person who knocked down the statues was stopped by the Vatican police and has been handed over to the Italian authorities,” an official statement from the Vatican read.
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Upon returning to the museum to revisit the show a few days later, the woman—who had been captured on surveillance camera putting the jacket into her bag—was arrested by the police, who happened to be at the museum looking for evidence.
While in custody, the retiree—who was reportedly “passionate” about art, according to Le Parisien—immediately confessed to stealing the jacket but claimed not to have realized it was an artwork. Police searched her home, where they found it with shortened sleeves.
Artist Oriol Vilanova’s jacket artwork in the exhibition
The Museo Chiaramonti in Vatican City. Photo: Lothar M. Peter/ullstein bild via Getty Images.
A British member of parliament (MP) who fancied himself a pickup artist allegedly used the galleries of London’s Tate Britain as the hunting grounds to meet women.
He is said to have prowled the museum in search of attractive tourists, striking up conversations using his knowledge of art history as an opener before revealing his political career and leveraging it for a meeting later in the day.
If all went according to plan, reports the Independent, the unidentified MP would take the women out to dinner and then home to his apartment for an amorous encounter.
This is how the book lays out the MP’s seduction game:
Early each Wednesday morning he would take himself off to the Tate Britain art gallery, along the Embankment from the Palace of Westminster, where he would study at length and assiduously the dominating work of art that featured on that day.
Armed with a coffee, he would then sit and wait until an attractive tourist – usually American—hove into view and started gazing approvingly at the picture.
Moving up behind her, he’d point out the beauty of the brushwork and praise the exhibit as one of the artist’s most characteristic pieces.
Thoroughly engaged, the woman would marvel at the MP’s knowledge of art, enquiring whether he was an art critic. “Not at all,” he’d say, “I’m a member of the House of Commons.
Eyes wide, the woman would then find herself invited to the mother of parliaments: “I happen to have a spare ticket for Prime Minister’s Questions today. Might you be free to come and watch?”
And along she would come.
The women would originally expect to meet their new friend afterward, but then he’d be whisked away to an urgent meeting with the party leader, and suggest dinner instead.
“And so matters would take their course,” Mitchell wrote. “Our American would be wined and dined in the splendor of the Commons Churchill Room restaurant, heading off afterwards to the honorable member’s well-appointed Westminster pad, conveniently situated close to the house, for a nightcap.”
The next day, he would head back home, Mitchell said, with “a contented smile.”
A woman visits the U.K.’s largest-ever retrospective dedicated to Portuguese visual artist Paula Rego at the Tate Britain in London. Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images.
On the night of June 1, thieves made off with ancient relics held in Normandy’s Fécamp Abbey—including two vials said to hold the blood of Jesus Christ, collected in the Holy Grail during his crucifixion.
Historically, people prayed to these objects for their children to return home from the Crusades, and for their loved ones to recover from the plague. Whether the thieves knew it or not, they’d scooped an artifact that Catholics have made pilgrimages to see for the past 1,000 years.
Shortly after the theft, the 52-year-old art detective received an email from an anonymous writer claiming they had the precious loot in their possession.
Brand, who is well known in art recovery circles, has been dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the art world.” For his most recent case, in February, he helped return a Roman statue to France 50 years after it was stolen.
Bodily fluids aren’t usually in Brand’s purview, but the objects in question also included liturgical dishes and an ornate container about eleven inches high, “a heavily gilded copper box with encrusted precious stones and depictions of Christ on the cross and other saints,” according to the AFP. And, as a Catholic himself, Brand knew he had to take this one on.
A selection of liturgical dishes also recovered.
More examples of the original painting and the new version. Courtesy of Prague City Hall.
Citizens of a 17th-century Polish town weren’t taking any chances when they laid to rest a woman they believed to be a vampire: She was buried with a sickle blade laid across her neck, intended to decapitate her should she attempt to rise from the grave.
Archaeologists from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, discovered the grave during excavations of a cemetery in the southern village of Pien. The unusual burial reflects superstitions surrounding vampires, thought to be undead monsters who subsisted on drinking the blood of humans.
Archaeologists in Poland discovered a “vampire” skeleton with a sickle over the throat. Photo by Mirosław Blicharski/Aleksander Poznań.
“She was neither ritually murdered nor was she one of the convicted in a witchcraft trial,” Poliński told Newsweek. “Those individuals were treated in a different way and, usually, they were thrown into provisional graves,” such as gallows.
It’s possible, he speculated, that the deceased had experienced some hardship or misfortune that led the town to fear that she would return from the dead to seek revenge.
“When I was the head of the Costume Institute’s conservation lab, I had to swat off requests by people (including Anna Wintour) to have irreplaceable objects in the collection be worn by models and celebrities,” Scarturro said.
Now, ICOM has stepped in.
“Historic garments should not be worn by anybody, public or private figures,” the organization said in a statement following the uproar. “Prevention is better than cure. Wrong treatment will destroy an object forever.”
Marilyn Monroe and writer Jose Bolanos sit at a dining table during the Golden Globes. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
Actress Marilyn Monroe sings for President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden on his 45th birthday, on May 20, 1962. Photo: Bettman via Getty Images.
The Dallas Museum of Art is assessing the damage to several ancient objects after a man reportedly broke into the museum on Wednesday night and smashed them.
The suspect has been identified as 21-year-old Brian Hernandez, who broke in around 10 p.m. because, he told authorities, he was “mad at his girl.”
A representative for the Dallas police department confirmed to Artnet News via email that officers “responded to a burglary in progress” at the museum and that the suspect “damaged several ancient artifacts.” Hernandez left the museum and was later located and taken into custody.
The Georgia Guidestones, a mysterious public artwork sometimes called the “American Stonehenge,” are no more. In the early hours on Wednesday, unknown individuals detonated a bomb that severely damaged the sculpture that stood in Elberton, Georgia for more than 40 years.
In the wake of the attack, and citing safety concerns, the government demolished what remained of the work, which had inspired many conspiracy theories. Kandiss Taylor, a Republican candidate for governor in Georgia, had recently promised to destroy them due to fears they were the work of a satanic New World Order.
The Georgia Guidestones following the bombing. Photo courtesy of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
“This level of detail… A new world is revealed day after day,” the scientist, Etienne Klein, wrote in the July 31 post.
But the scientist’s image, it turns out, was just a photograph of a slice of chorizo sausage on a black background—a fact he only disclosed after the post scored thousands of views, likes, and retweets.
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