Displaying items by tag: gilded

Andrew Butterfield, an art dealer and Renaissance scholar, had seen the two-and-a-half-foot tall wooden sculpture several years before, in a photograph, and thought it was “really fantastic.”

“It felt so much like the embodiment of the early Renaissance,” he said recently. He passed on making an offer then. But the gilded figure of a plump, graceful cherub, or putto, nagged at him, and when he finally did buy it, in 2012, it set him off down an art-historical detective trail that made him glad he followed his instincts. Mr. Butterfield and several other experts he has enlisted now believe the statue is a lost work by Donatello, one of the defining artists of the Renaissance, and a rare example of the artist’s work in wood, making the discovery not only a major addition to Donatello’s surviving corpus but also to the history of Western sculpture.

A new fountain has been unveiled at Versailles for the first time in over 300 years. Made from 2,000 gilded glass orbs, Les Belles Dances (2015) by French sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel is a permanent commissioned artwork designed to honor King Louis XIV.

Collaborating with landscape architect Louis Benech, Othoniel's design was influenced by the King's personal dance instruction book.

A $5 million reward for masterworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum a quarter century ago has failed to lead to their recovery, prompting authorities Tuesday to announce a new offer: $100,000 for the return of one of the least valuable items, a bronze eagle finial.

The reward far exceeds the value of the 10-inch-high gilded eagle, which was swiped from the top of a pole supporting a silk Napoleonic flag. It was taken along with 12 other pieces valued at $500 million, including masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Manet, in what remains the world’s largest art heist and one of Boston’s most baffling crime mysteries.

The master framers of Eli Wilner & Company recently completed two hand-carved and gilded, openwork Rococo-style frames for a pair of portraits by John Singleton Copley at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

The existing frames on the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Hooper were in presentable condition, but were not historically appropriate, leading the museum’s curators to seek a solution from Eli Wilner & Company. Copley was known to have selected a specific style of frame for paintings done at the time these portraits were painted.

Though finding antique frames for the paintings would have been the optimal choice, the chances of locating a pair of frames in the appropriate sizes and within budget was a near impossibility.

A building that once housed the pharmacy of French King Louis XIV has recently brimmed with activity again—this time, involving blown-glass orbs, steel pipes and curious nozzles. Since January, the Paris-based sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel has turned this vaulted chamber on the periphery of Versailles' grounds into his makeshift studio.

When the artist finishes installing the three resulting fountain-sculptures later this summer, they will become the  in the palace's gardens in more than 300 years.

Since 2008 Versailles, the lavish regal complex about 18 miles west of central Paris, has held temporary art exhibitions inside its 17th-century gilded ballrooms and manicured gardens. These shows have featured contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. Mr. Othoniel's commission—part of the total renovation of a garden originally designed by the famed royal landscaper André Le Nôtre —is meant to stand the test of time.