#relic-authenticity

#relic-authenticity

Scams involving antiques and collectibles are almost as old as some of the items. But internet sales now mean fraudsters have a much wider audience.

The Helmet of Cotofenesti, a priceless gold artefact from Romania, was stolen in January 2025 during a robbery at the Drents Museum in the Netherlands.

The significant number of ancestors held in UK museums is extremely distressing and symbolic of the colonial origins of these collections. We hope that the responses gathered by The Guardian will be shared with the relevant communities to support them in bringing their ancestors home.

This project demonstrates the combined power of science, the study of human remains and historical research to discover new information about the six mortuary chests and their occupants which would not have been available to us a generation ago.

Bregman claims, 'Today the whole of Europe risks turning into one big Venice, a beautiful open-air museum. A great destination for Chinese and American tourists. A place to admire what was once the centre of the world.' This statement encapsulates the concern that Europe is losing its cultural significance.

The exquisite, jewel-encrusted boxes were badly damaged in 2024, after they were among seven treasures stolen from Paris's Musée Cognacq-Jay by a gang of axe-wielding thieves. The perpetrators broke into the temporary exhibition, titled "Luxe de Poche," or "Pocket Luxury," on November 20, making off with goods that were, at the time, reported to be worth more than €1 million.

Picture this: you're knee-deep in renovation dust, crowbar in hand, when something unexpected tumbles from behind century-old plaster. A yellowed envelope? A strange metal box? That moment when your heart skips because you realize you might have just found something extraordinary. For some lucky homeowners, these discoveries turn out to be worth thousands of dollars, transforming a simple home improvement project into an unexpected treasure hunt.

This short captures Tim Bovard, the staff taxidermist for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, as he reflects on over five decades spent perfecting his craft. Sparked by a childhood fascination with the museum's dioramas that never faded, Bovard has devoted his career to shaping what he calls the 'illusion of life' - a process that requires both scientific precision and imaginative interpretation.

When you reach a certain age, one of the things you notice at the turn of the year is the "stuff" you have accumulated. Old newspapers, documents and books jostle with the detritus of life, from pieces of dead coral from Barbados to an old label that never made it onto a bottle of Guinness. I have spent the last decade preaching to my adult children, telling them to stop buying things.

Treasures unearthed by hundreds of archaeologists so far during work on the controversial planned HS2 train line have been shown exclusively to the BBC. The 450,000 objects, which are being held in a secret warehouse, include a possible Roman gladiator's tag, a hand axe that may be more than 40,000 years old and 19th Century gold dentures. It is an "unprecedented" amount and array of items, which will yield new insights into Britain's past, says the Centre for British Archaeology.

Advanced imaging and material analysis have led experts to reattribute a long-overlooked biblical scene to Rembrandt van Rijn, identifying the 1633 painting as a lost masterpiece after more than six decades of doubt. Titled Vision of Zacharias in the Temple, the work was last studied in 1960, when scholars ruled out the possibility that it could be by the Dutch master.

The snippet carries the phrase "Fathers of the Senate!" which is nowhere found in surviving Washington documents. The expression is borrowed from ancient Roman Senate-specifically the Latin patres conscripti , or "Conscript Fathers"-and quite possibly wasn't the patrician tone Washington intended to set for a young republic. It is unknown why or how it was used in this case as the manuscript from which the fragment was cut is long lost.

An analysis of two paintings in museums in the US and Italy by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck has raised a profound question: what if neither were by Van Eyck? Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, the name given to near-identical unsigned paintings hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Royal Museums of Turin, represent two of the small number of surviving works by one of western art's greatest masters, revered for his naturalistic portraits and religious subjects.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote about the "inalienable" rights of man in the US Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, it's possible he lifted the term from the French. And long before it was ever used as an adjective to describe human rights, it defined royal property. To this day, "inalienability" remains a cornerstone of public collections in France-and many other countries-impacting museums and their ability to deaccession, including for purposes of restitution.

The traditional museum experience, pausing in front of an object, and absorbing its history visually or by reading its description, has long shaped how collectors and others relate to cultural treasures. Yet, over the last few decades, digital technology has quietly rewritten many of those rules, changing not only how collections are exhibited but also how they are documented, preserved, and even inherited.

Once again, A.I. and human experts are butting heads over the authenticity of a world-famous painting. A Belgian art historian has refuted claims made by Swiss company Art Recognition that two paintings have been falsely attributed to the Northern Renaissance master Jan van Eyck. The paintings in question are versions of Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata (ca. 1428-32) belonging to the Royal Museums of Turin and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Recently, AI decided that a painting long thought to be a copy of Caravaggio's The Lute Player is actually by the master, while another version of the same subject, previously thought to be authentic, is not. Both conclusions were disputed by the former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Keith Christiansen. A similar debate erupted in March 2025 when AI declared that portions of The Bath of Diana, also long believed to be a copy, could have been painted by Peter Paul Rubens.