Portrait of a Lady, the painting by Gustav Klimt found last month in the garden wall of the modern art museum it had been stolen from 22 years earlier, has been authenticated. The Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art in Piacenza announced Friday that art experts engaged by the city prosecutor's office verified that the painting was the original completed by Klimt in [...]

The only surviving copy of The Age of Innocence known to have belonged to Edith Wharton herself has been donated to the Mount, Wharton's former home and now a museum dedicated to her. Donated by book collector Dennis Kahn, the edition is a 1921 sixth printing of her most successful novel. It bears her signature and a bookplate from Sainte-Claire-du-Château in Hyères, a restored convent on the [...]

A pen and ink drawing in a 14th century travelogue is the oldest known city view of Venice. The image was drawn by Niccolò da Poggibonsi, a Franciscan friar who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Egypt in 1345-50, in his account of his travels now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. He wrote his travelogue the Libro d'oltramare, after his return to Italy. [...]

UK Arts Minister Helen Whately has blocked export of a unique 15th century Middle English manuscript. The Speculum Inclusorum (the Mirror of Recluses) was written by an unknown author as a manual for women who chose to become anchorites, a type of religious recluse that gained some popularity in medieval England.

Anchorites dedicated their lives to god by enclosing themselves in a small cell attached to a church. [...]

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