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135 articles in this edition.
A sculpture in Vancouver was so convincing that firefighters broke down a gallery door to save it
A passerby saw feet sticking out from behind a counter and called 911. What police and firefighters found was a 2024 artwork, not a body.
A princess was told photography was not a job for women. She spent seventy years proving otherwise.
Claude d'Orléans was discouraged from photojournalism in 1955 for being a woman, and a princess. An exhibition in Florence shows what she shot instead.
Raphael painted a dog, then hid it under a unicorn, and the woman who owns both stares out with eyes nobody can name
X-rays found a faithful little dog beneath Raphael's famous unicorn. The animal changed twice; the identity of the woman holding it has never been settled at all.
A Roman pet owner named the family cat before naming the family
A 1,800-year-old mosaic in southern Turkey labels a cat 'Emerald' and a dog 'Ocean', giving two household pets the kind of individual identity Roman art rarely bothered to record.
Four Metres Under the Notre Dame Ticket Queue, an Archaeologist Is Standing in the Fourth Century
Four metres under Notre Dame's forecourt, archaeologists are racing through 1,700 years of Paris before the square gets its new trees. Roman coins, medieval latrines and writing no one can read.
For four centuries a chair killed no one, but everyone in Valladolid believed it did
A sixteenth-century chair bolted upside down to a wall in Valladolid was blamed for the deaths of two caretakers and two students. New research says the devil had nothing to do with it.
A Roman harbour is emerging from the sand off Puglia, and it may have welcomed the man who became Augustus
Divers off Le Cesine are back at a submerged Roman harbour that may be where a young Octavian landed in 44 BC, on his way to becoming Augustus.
A Puppet with No Strings Attached to Just One Country
Two centuries after Carlo Collodi's birth, Pinocchio is being claimed all over again, this time by New York, through cinema, scholarship and a Brooklyn bookshop.
A Small Bronze Horse, Twenty-Five Centuries Before Marino Marini
At the Doge's Palace, the San Casciano bronzes open an exhibition about what the Etruscans and the Veneti genuinely shared: water as a threshold to the sacred.
Rome's National Library of Archaeology and Art History Just Closed Its Doors After 104 Years, and No One Can Say When They Will Reopen
On 7 September 2026, Palazzo Venezia's storied research library shut for a move to Palazzo San Felice, with no confirmed reopening date before 2027.
A judge and his father waited 4,500 years under Saqqara for someone to read their names
A Spanish-Egyptian team has found a Fifth Dynasty tomb at Saqqara with two vividly painted chapels belonging to a scribe and his son, a court judge.
A Fish Survey Ship Went Looking for Cod and Hauled Up Rome
A Spanish oceanographic vessel counting fish stocks off Formentera pulled up 26 Roman amphorae and 17 crates of pottery from 1,400 metres down, purely by accident.
Five Minutes Was Too Slow to Save Renoir's Last Garden
Thieves cut four Renoir paintings from their frames at the artist's former home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, in a raid police reached five minutes too late.
The only chair to survive Bronze Age Europe still has its otter skin seat
In a Danish burial mound, a chieftain was laid to rest with a folding chair some 3,400 years old. It is the only one that has ever come down to us whole.
Medieval artists were not bad at drawing. They were drawing power, not eyesight
Kings twice the size of their castles, saints who dwarf cathedrals: medieval art's 'wrong' proportions were never mistakes. They were theology, measured in inches.
The Alhambra Now Has a Digital Twin, and It Was Already Watching When the Ground Shook
Granada built a complete virtual replica of the Alhambra wired with 62 sensors. Days after launch, a swarm of earthquakes gave it its first real test.
A one-tonne bronze ballerina just vanished from an Italian fuel magnate's private collection
Thieves stole a 1,200-pound Manzù sculpture and works attributed to Picasso from a collector's headquarters in Abruzzo, in a heist that needed heavy machinery and a crew.
A Buddhist Cave Carved to Face the Sunrise Has Never Left Korea, So Paris Is Building One That Can Be Touched
Seokguram's granite Buddha has never travelled. A Paris exhibition brings it near through photography, braille reliefs and, from 23 November, a hyperreal digital cave.
A sixteen year old artist out-trolled Damien Hirst, and the Metropolitan Police had to save him from himself
A teenage graffiti artist mocked Damien Hirst's diamond skull, so Hirst had him arrested for half a million pounds of art theft over some pencils.
Lasers Just Found a Portuguese Town That the Amazon Swallowed Whole
LiDAR scans have revealed the streets of an 18th-century Portuguese settlement buried under Brazilian rainforest for two centuries.
Cezanne never finished his bathers, and that unfinished quality became modern art's founding gesture
Cezanne's endlessly reworked bathers taught Picasso, Matisse and Malevich how to break the body. A Grand Palais show traces the debt.
A man has spent fifty years building a machine to watch the North Star drift out of place
In the New Mexico desert, Charles Ross has spent five decades building Star Axis, a stone observatory designed to make visible 26,000 years of Earth's wobble.
A Forest Went Missing in a Canadian Lake, Then Turned Up 20 Miles Away
A floating island the size of two football fields vanished from a British Columbia reservoir and reappeared weeks later, still growing trees and birds.
A metal detectorist searched a Polish junkyard and found a Vandal warrior's grave instead of scrap
A hobbyist scanning a rubbish-strewn field near Wrocław uncovered an 1,800-year-old shield boss packed with cremated bone, the resting place of a Vandal fighter.