Art history

A regional laboratory in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır, home of many different civilizations spanning thousands of years, has performed maintenance and repair works on approximately 1,252 artifacts in 2023 to shed light on cultural history and exhibit them in museums.

It would be too easy to comment that the theft of antiquities from the British Museum, allegedly by a staff member who has since been sacked, is a sign of divine providence: the repository of much of humanity's history, some of it of dubious provenance or evident theft, is getting a taste of its own medicine, and proving to be a far less adequate custodian of that incomparable treasure than it

Polykleitos Rengos (1903-1984) is the subject of an exhibition at the Byzantine Museum (byzantinemuseum.gr) that casts light on his important contribution to the reintroduction of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine tradition in religious painting.

The Orthodox world celebrates one of the great Christian holidays - the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem. Days before his death on the Cross, Jesus Christ was solemnly welcomed in the holy city. The crowd greeted him with palm branches. This is how the tradition of distributing consecrated willow branches in temples was established.

A painting by Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon of fellow U.K. painter Lucian Freud sold on June 29 for 43.3 million pounds ($52.5 million, 50.2 million euros), according to Sotheby's auction house.

The price is an auction record for a painting by Bacon sold in London and also for any single panel painting by the artist.

It has examples of all three classical orders of the Greek architecture

Iraqi artist Wijdan al-Majed is transforming Baghdad's concrete jungle into a color-filled city with murals depicting well-known figures from the war-scarred country and abroad.

Perched on a scaffold at a busy intersection, the 49-year-old artist and instructor at the Baghdad College of Fine Arts is adding final touches to a mural dedicated to celebrated Iraqi poet Muzzafar al-Nawab.

Verdant landscapes, stylized portraits of peasant women, curved sculptures, an exhibition in Baghdad is allowing art aficionados to rediscover the pioneers of contemporary Iraqi art.

Around 100 items are on display in the capital, returned and restored nearly two decades after they were looted.

This iconography is a copy of the Enthroned Virgin Mary painted by Emmanuel Jane circa 1664

Over 17,000 looted ancient artefacts recovered from the United States and other countries were handed over to Iraq's Culture Ministry on Aug. 3, a restitution described by the government as the largest in the country's history.

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