Heritage

Botticelli’s violent stories have a contemporary resonance in #MeToo era

“Spalliera” panels depicting parables are reunited at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for the first time in 500 years

Lost artfeature

Lost art: should we rebuild sacked castles and ruined palaces?

Noah Charney examines how historic buildings that were needlessly destroyed can live on today

San Francisco’s Van Gogh is the real deal

The still life of fruit and chestnuts, until recently dismissed as a fake, was painted in Paris

a blog by Martin Bailey

New York architect Annabelle Selldorf to lead design of visitors centre in Beijing’s Forbidden City

When restoration is complete, the public will have access to Qianlong Garden complex for the first time

Dresden ballroom returns to gilded glory as part of €300m palace reconstruction

Residential Palace complex, a casualty of Allied bombing in the Second World War, is due to be rebuilt by 2021

Africa’s pre-colonial ‘crown jewels’ to find a home in new South African museum

Javett Art Centre at University of Pretoria will display 800-year-old gold collection excavated in the 1930s

Aliph, the global fund to protect cultural heritage, announces its first projects in Iraq and Mali

Launched in 2016, Aliph will finance restoration work with technical support from the Louvre and Smithsonian Institution

Lush historic gardens bloom once more in Agra, India

The World Monuments Fund announces the completion of a four-year conservation effort

Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosive art, preserved for the ages

Getty scientists explore the artist’s use of gunpowder and other materials for a definitive new book

Herculaneum’s museum of relics finally opens its doors, 44 years on

Inaugural show presents jewels and precious objects excavated in the early 20th century alongside more recent discoveries

Restoration for early Renaissance pulpit will get the big-screen treatment

The 1301 carved pulpit will undergo a two-year intensive monitoring programme

Restorers of Nîmes arena expand their sights

Conservation effort now includes passageways and interior

How pioneering climate-change science dated one of Britain's oldest houses

Landmark Trust's restoration finds that oak timber used to build Welsh house was felled in the winters of 1418-19 and 1420-21

The year in heritage: conservators become art

The conservation of masterpieces is happening in the full glare of the public

Unesconews

Goodbye Venice, goodbye Ravenna, goodbye Ferrara, goodbye Carthage?

Many World Heritage Sites around the Mediterranean are at grave risk from sea-level rise by 2100, report says

Dürer used his famous Praying Hands drawing to advertise his talent

Chief curator of Vienna’s Albertina argues that the work, which shows the artist's own hands, was a finished work rather than preparatory drawing

California wildfires threaten architectural landmarks and historic sites

The 19th century Sepulveda Adobe and western movie set Paramount Ranch have been destroyed, but the fate of many other buildings remain unknown

Restoration of rare English Medieval altarpiece reveals a history of serial vandalism

The Battel Hall retable, which survived the fury of 16th-century iconoclasts, bears later scars of graffiti and "witchmarks" against evil spirits

Looted vessels returned at event marking 15 years of US-Italy art crime fighting co-operation

Italian official also says the country will ratify 2017 Nicosia Convention outlining penalties for offenses involving cultural heritage

Long-lost Tudor tapestry could be saved for the UK

Work commissioned by Henry VIII for Hampton Court Palace left the country in the early 1970s

Lawcomment

Cultural 'matrimony' could resolve heritage disputes

We need to rethink our perceptions of an artist or an artefact as having a single, unified or homogenous heritage

Top museum directors on the challenges of climate change and mass tourism

Vatican conference on preventive conservation warns of environmental impact of short-term politics

Crime news

Police arrest man after attempted theft of Magna Carta at Salisbury Cathedral

Incident is a further blow to English city following the novichok poisonings earlier this year

Alaskan dancer helps the Met solve riddle of the Yup’ik mask

Conservator calls in master storyteller to decipher shamanic object

Urgent revamp of William Morris’s country home to go ahead after £4.3m grant

UK National Lottery award will also fund a new education centre at the Victorian designer’s 16th-century Kelmscott Manor

Chunks of British Parliament go on sale

Historic Pugin floor tiles, on which many a prime minister has trodden, available for £200 a piece

Venice rallies to save its ancient glass-blowing industry from Chinese competition

The Venice Glass Week is a city-wide collaboration between museums, commercial galleries and artisans of Murano

Heading home: early Rubens masterpiece returns to the artist's Antwerp studio for the first time

The work, lent by Art Gallery of Ontario ahead of a major travelling show on the artist, will undergo research at the Rubenshuis