News from the art world
The assault on Ukraine’s heritage
Ukraine’s cultural heritage is in peril, said Vandana Kalra in The Indian Express. The country is home to many “priceless works of art, cultural artefacts and monuments”, all of which could be at risk from indiscriminate bombing in its major cities. Some have already been destroyed. On 28 February, the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum near Kyiv was “burned to the ground by a Russian assault”: its holdings included 25 paintings by Maria Prymachenko, a “celebrated” artist who once attracted praise from Picasso. And even if Ukraine’s artistic heritage does survive the bombs, said Neda Ulaby on NPR, there is the additional fear that Putin will seize artefacts, icons, paintings and memorials and have them transported to Russia. Kyiv’s National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War has already evacuated its collections to a safer location. But in most cases, the “sad truth” is that it’s probably too late for such a move. And if President Putin “is trying to destroy Ukraine”, said New Yorkbased museum director Maria Shust, “he’s not going to care whether he destroys the history of Ukraine” in the process.
The wrong wife Hever Castle in Kent has long been seen as home to a famous portrait of Catherine Parr, the sixth and final wife of Henry VIII. But it turns out that it probably isn’t, says Craig Simpson in The Daily Telegraph. The portrait was always assumed to have been painted around 1530, but new research indicates it must have been painted a decade earlier
– a time when Catherine would have been in her teens. The painting, it’s now believed, is actually of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. So why the mix-up? More than likely, says historian Dr Owen Emmerson, it’s due to the fact that Henry went for a particular look in women. Both Catherines had “fair skin and red hair, which were broadly in line with the ideal beauty standard of the day”. In short, the first Catherine “was so similar in looks to her successor that the error was never noticed”.