British Museum Receives Its Most Expensive Gift, Michelangelo May Have Painted a Woman with Breast Cancer, Two Ben Enwonwu Works Discovered, and More: Morning Links for November 14, 2024

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The Headlines

BRITISH MUSEUM RECEIVES MOST VALUABLE GIFT. The British Museum has received its highest-value donation to date, as the BBC reports,in the form of 1,700 rare Chinese ceramics worth $1.27 billion. They were donated by the Sir Percival David Foundation, which had previously loaned the precious, thousand-year-old treasures to the museum. British businessman Sir Percival David began his collection in 1913, traveling throughout Europe and Asia to find exceptional pieces, and its donation brings the institution’s collection of such ceramics to 10,000 items, effectively the largest of its kind for a public institution outside Taiwan and China. Highlights include Ru wares made for the Northern Song dynasty court in 1086, and a 550-year-old Doucai cup glazed with delicate figures of roosters, once used to serve wine to the Chenghua emperor.

DID MICHELANGELO PAINT A WOMAN WITH BREAST CANCER? A new study by the University of Paris-Saclay suggests that the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel fresco painted by Michelangelo may depict a woman with breast cancer, reports El Pais. A team of researchers led by Rafaella Bianucci proposes that the scene of The Flood in the Renaissance masterpiece contains the figure of one woman with possible symptoms of breast cancer, who is also looking down and pointing towards the ground, while sitting beside others who are condemned to die in the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark. The symptoms reportedly include a “deformed and retracted nipple, a misshapen areola, a bulging area, and possible nodules in the armpit,” which are “consistent with breast carcinoma,” writes Bianucci and his co-authors. Experts argue that Michelangelo had advanced knowledge of human anatomy for his time, because he dissected corpses and attempted to publish an illustrated treatise on anatomy. Any such deformity would likely have been intended by the artist, goes the argument. Still, “the interpretation of any painting by a viewer is relatively speculative,” notes nephrologist Garabed Eknoyan. The report contains a few detailed images for consideration and further speculation.

The Digest

In a new book, Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism, author and art critic Sebastian Smee gives a revelatory account of “Manetsplaining.” In supposedly trying to help fellow Impressionist Berthe Morisot work through a difficult portrait, Edouard Manet effectively painted over her work, in an incident she described as “agonizing.” [The Guardian]

In a rare agreement between a legal heir and a museum, a Pissarro painting sold by a Jewish couple in order to unsuccessfully save their two small children from Nazi persecution, will stay in Germany’s Kunsthalle Bremen. In exchange, the museum is also helping publish a book about the tragic story of its original owners, as well as compensating a surviving heir. [The New York Times]

Two Ben Enwonwu artworks were identified in one week during the most recent episode of Antiques Roadshow on BBC. One sculpture was used as a doorstop, another painting was hiding in plain sight. The rare, abstract sculpture by the Nigerian artist born in 1917 had been purchased for $63 three years ago by its owner, and is believed to be worth up to $19,000. [Artnet News]

Paris is preparing to open the Notre-Dame Cathedral to the public at a globally broadcast ceremony on December 7 and 8, one week after ringing its bells together for the first time since the 2019 fire. The opening will include masses, concerts, and other events announced at a Wednesday news conference. [Le Figaro]

Following the 2023 shuttering of the 1954-founded Jean Fournier gallery in Paris, 35 artworks from its collection are heading to Christie’s in December. Highlights include works by Joan Mitchell and Simon Hantaï. [The Art Newspaper, France]

The Kicker

WOMEN WHO HELMED NEW YORK’S MUSEUMS. This week an exhibit at New York’s MoMA attempts to correct history, namely by demonstrating that it was women, not men, who ran most of New York’s major museums, from the Guggenheim, MoMA, to the Whitney. There was Juliana Force who first directed the Whitney in 1929, Hilla Rebay, also an artist, directed Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, and a trio of female friends, Lillie P. Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mary Quinn Sullivan who founded MoMA in the 1920s. On the occasion of the exhibition, “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” and a new book on the topic, Cultured Magazine talks to MoMA curators, Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, about why so many of these institutions were led by women then, compared to so few now.