Eliana Willis

Maffeo Barberini lived up to the lofty expectations of his aristocratic parents by being elected pope in 1623. Aside from expanding the papal states, repelling a radical French theological movement, and navigating the Thirty Years’ War, Urban VIII found time to patronize the arts (Gian Lorenzo Bernini was his personal favorite).
Barberini had cultivated artistic tastes early on. In 1598, his friend and fellow clergyman Francesco Maria del Monte had taken a struggling artist under his wing (housing him at his family palazzo) and suggested Barberini commission a portrait. That artist was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and the work he painted, of a quietly vigorous 30-year-old, is now on display to the public for the first time.
Fittingly, the venue is Urban VIII’s old familial haunt, Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which now houses the National Gallery of Ancient Art. It was built during Urban VIII’s papacy by Bernini and architect Carlo Maderno and remained in the family into the 20th-century.
Caravaggio, Portrait of Maffeo Barberini (1598). Photo: Getty.
The painting was passed from one generation to the next for roughly 300 years and only left the Barberinis in the 1930s when the family sold off its estate. As such, it has no accompanying documentation and remained a work unknown until the 1960s, when Roberto Longhi, an Italian Caravaggio scholar, published an article on the Barberini portrait.
While only a handful of specialists have seen the painting in person, there is broad academic agreement that the work, which is held by an unnamed private collection in Florence, is a Caravaggio. The case may be proved one way or the other given a promise by the organizers “to study the work in greater scientific-critical depth.”
The Palazzo Barberini in Rome now houses the National Gallery of Ancient Art. Photo: Getty Images.
By the time of the painting in 1598, Barberini had obtained a law doctorate from the University of Pisa and with the help of his aristocratic connections had moved through a series of important church appointments. Within a couple of years he will be the papal legate in France. The painting shows a seated Barberini emerging from shadow, his face spotlit and glowing. He appears modestly dressed in simple a black cap and gown and steers his gaze off to the side. The portrait may not boast the bold flair of Caravaggio’s broader oeuvre — such as Judith Beheading Holofernes (1602) or Narcissus (1599) which stand nearby at the Palazzo Barberini —but the mastery of light is certainly evident.
“The heart of the painting lies in the hands, the left hand clutching a letter and the right hand emerging from the painting,” said co-curator Paola Nicita in a statement. “It is a painting that expresses itself through gestures.”
“Caravaggio – The Portrait Unveiled” is on view at the Barberini Palace, Rome from November 23 through February 23. More

In the foyer of the Met’s second-floor gallery, Cleopatra’s Chair sits empty, beckoning. This throne, constructed by legendary sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, is a remnant of a sustained revelation. In 1957, at only 18 years old, the American artist visited Egypt and experienced an awakening, this first encounter with artworks beyond the European canon influencing her practice for decades. She recalled of the experience: “For someone exposed only to the Greco-Roman tradition, it was a revelation. I suddenly saw how insular the Western World was vis-a-vis the nonwhite, non-Christian world. The blast of Egyptian culture was irresistible. The sheer magnificence of it. The elegance and perfection, the timelessness, the depth. After that, Greek and Roman Art looked like pastry to me.” She completed Cleopatra’s Chair in 1994 (five years before her own groundbreaking solo exhibition at the Met).
“Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt 1876–Now” highlights almost 200 years of this return-to-self. It’s a meeting ground of Black cultural production, a decidedly pan-African sensibility that engages with ancient Egypt as a spiritual point of reference for fashioning a collective identity; a source for inspiration and a site of affinity against the erasure of a cultural lineage. The exhibition, on view through February 17, 25, offers more than mythos, grounding itself in the promise of great origins reclaimed from a discipline of Egyptology that had categorized the civilization as “proto-European,” separate from the rest of continental Africa. The show’s aims are clear, but our means of flight remain as unresolved as these histories. Egyptian sphinxes don’t have wings.
Installation view of “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now,” on view November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Eileen Travell, Courtesy of The Met
The Met’s warm walls bear the threads of this restorative practice with a nod of recognition. It’s a noteworthy celebration that feels uncharacteristic—if not unheard of—at this institutional scale. The museum’s commitment to the work feels singular in its candor, an endeavor that imbues the space with an authenticity that is above all else deeply comforting. It’s a feeling only dwarfed by the magnitude of its implications: the way a movement appears before our eyes with resonances that touch the soul. 
The survey’s pantheon of Black artists ranges from contemporary titans like David Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat to lesser known figures from the 19th century. Together they depict a well of spiritual data, the source material of self. Beyond the visual works, however, the abundance of music and literature underscores the museum’s role as a public resource. 
Installation view of “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now,” on view November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Eileen Travell, Courtesy of The Met
In the room titled “Awakening and Ascent,” covers of early issues of The Crisis, a magazine published by the NAACP since 1910, are just one element exploring Afrocentrism’s rise alongside the moods of the Harlem Renaissance. Copies of the publication, alongside other corollary publications, are available to peruse in a spacious reading room designed by Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus. The exhibit’s final room “Space Is The Place” carries the name of the canonical film featuring Sun Ra. Alongside other images rife with pastiche, the videos are just one of many instances where the show complicates the work of dreaming up Black futures. The exhibition is an accessible anthology; the stories bound to each piece are at once preserved behind vitrines and within arm’s reach.  
In the “Kings and Queens” section, Fred Wilson’s Grey Area (Brown Version) greets the viewer: a series of five bust-replicas depicting Queen Nefertiti, their plaster pigmented in shades ranging from sandstone to deep umber. The series contends with the question of color, its lingering influences on our contemporary perceptions of these ancient histories. With enough time, the eye discerns that none of the busts’ shades resemble human skin. The busts only acknowledge the impossibility of their resemblance to any common reality. There remains an ever-expanding spectrum of colors between these figures, unsettled explorations of a contested history.
Still from Space is the Place (1974). Directed by John Coney. Courtesy North American Star System Production; John Coney
On the other side of the wall, a series of diptychs by conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady likens photographs of her sisters and daughters to the remnants of royal Egyptian stoneworks. Her late sister, Devonia Evangeline O’Grady, appears in a bridal portrait beside a photograph of the renowned Nefertiti bust referenced by Wilson (as well as a critical mass of other artists featured in the show). In the series, titled Miscegenated Family Album, O’Grady highlights the widely understood cultural and gendered associations around figures such as Nefertiti, echoing the ways in which a shared ancestry continues to both unify and trouble our own legacies. An image of the queen’s bust sits on my bedside table.
Installation view of “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now,” on view November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Eileen Travell, Courtesy of The Met
The collection of works in the show together highlight Egypt’s long-held sacred presence in our dreams: something to strive for and somewhere we’ve already been. The works stand in as tools against social death, a record of the imaginative thinking required to transcend what has marred Black identities across the globe for generations. 
Nearby, Simone Leigh’s contemplative bronze figure, Sharifa, leans against a wall. The figure towers in the room at a stature over nine feet tall, even in repose. One foot emerges from under her floor-length dress, implying something of the precarity of her posture, or perhaps footnoting the fine line between rest and labor under the contingencies of Black feminine embodiment. While there are pieces by Leigh more directly emblematic of Egypt’s influence on her practice—such as the glazed Sphinx she featured at the 2022 Venice Biennale—this monumental work shares the massive quality of an obelisk, a presence felt by way of its indifferent gaze. It’s an association further heightened by two adjacent gypsum totems by LA-based sculptor Lauren Halsey, constructed specifically for the show. The pair of untitled works are airbrushed with landmarks from the artist’s hometown, both those recognized by the city and those sanctified by its residents. These are monuments to the intimately local, shaded by the motifs of a history that edges on mythology.
Installation view of “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now,” on view November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Eileen Travell, Courtesy of The Met
The section of the show titled “Nu Nile Abstraction” presented some of the most formally risky works in the show, examples of how the glance-friendly symbologies that fill other rooms can be distilled to pure concept. Here, many artists take on the shifting image of the pyramid as a point of departure. Maren Hassinger’s Love (Pyramid) forms its triangle shape in the gallery’s corner. Pinned to the walls and floor, each pink plastic bag is filled with human breath, an accumulation of utterances – the word love. Rashid Johnson’s sculptural environment, titled Pyramid, offers objects rich with cultural memory atop its shelves: mounds of shea butter and black soap, a vinyl record from The Modern Jazz Quartet. The sentimental takes form through the readymade. At the center of the space, Sam Gilliam’s Pyramid refurbishes the sacred geometry in lacquered wood, providing a launchpad for the psychic leaps that make these worlds coterminous with the contemporary.
Clips of music videos and performances by Alice Coltrane, Michael Jackson, and Beyoncé ground the exhibition in cultural touchstones accessible for a wide audience. Played in sequence, they begin to map a cycle of reincarnation among these pop culture icons, though the pharaonic archetypes they reference remain timeless. The well-known video works are staged in a screening room outfitted with a disco ball in the shape of our dear Nefertiti. This multimedia approach doesn’t end with the objects on display. A robust performance program is set for the specially-built neon atrium dubbed “The Performance Pyramid.”  The space will host artists such as Karon Davis, Clifford Owens, and M. Lamar & The Living Earth Show, in collaboration with Met Live Arts. Tomassino hopes the exhibition can be a “welcoming cultural oasis for people of all walks of life.”
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Flight Into Egypt (1923). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, image © Metropolitan Museum of Art
While there are many allusions to ancient architectures and traditions of object-making throughout “Flight,” the curatorial team resisted including any antiquities from the Met’s collection. McClain Groff, the Research Associate for the exhibition, tells me that this noted absence is intentional. “If you want to see those, you can go to the Egyptian wing.” 
“Flight into Egypt,” does, however,  include the works of living Egyptian artists such as Cairo-born sculptor Iman Issa and feminist polymath Ghada Amer. The “Heritage Studies” on display are more in conversation with each other than they are with any preoccupation with the “ancient.” Maha Maamoun’s Domestic Tourism II is a montage steeped in celluloid fantasy, a compilation of popular cinematic representations of Egypt from the New Hollywood era of the mid-20th century. Mahmoud Mokhtar’s Bride of the Nile rests in the center of a room, a subtle standout among more commanding figurative works. The bronze and silver bust peers over its scarab-encrusted clavicle, as if eavesdropping on the video collage installed behind it. She personifies the collective turning of a head to look back on a past that is never as distant as history may portray. Her earring dangles, frozen in an inertia that is almost audible.
Moving through the show there’s a sense of the perennial now-ness of Egypt’s influence. Everyone has their own relationship to the mythology; there was a feeling of nostalgic pride visible on the faces of many wanderers. For curator Akili Tommasino it’s especially personal: “I designed [the exhibition] for myself at 15.”  
Derek Fordjour, Board Meeting (Brotherhood Smoke) (2021). Collection of Robert F. Smith Photo: © Derek Fordjour, courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Photo: Mark Blower, Daneil Greer
As a child of immigrants hailing from the island nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tommasino’s upbringing in Brooklyn influenced his own understanding of a larger, global African diaspora.  This experience is common, a way to reconcile, a rite of passage. The urban environment continues to inspire. Three longstanding public artworks located in Harlem are temporarily designated as part of the exhibition. The inclusion of these site-specific works, located in subway stations and along the Metro North railway, highlights the populist essence of this pan-African sensibility. It’s a coveted tradition, one that has been deployed thoroughly across disciplines for over a century, but has never been concisely articulated with such focus until now.
The tradition, however, appears to be so pervasive that it also at times veers into cliché. These gestures of self-appropriation are often derided when pushed up against newer schemas of Black liberation. A pride in Egyptian ancestry among Black Americans has often been relegated to an association with the “hotep,” a term referring to a derogatory archetype of Black pride that has come to resemble a parody of the aesthetics on display in the Met show. 
Installation view of “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now,” on view November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Eileen Travell, Courtesy of The Met
I asked Tommasino about potential associations with the label “hotep,” and he led me to the work of Kemetic practitioner and jeweler Baaba Heru. My eyes were drawn to The Ankh of Love, a hand-forged and -filed talisman composed of copper, silver, and brass in the shape of the symbol for eternal life. My mother’s only tattoo is an ankh. Her name is Love. “Heru said that when he got into Kemetic studies, saying ‘hotep’ was a way to greet each other with peace,” Tommasino explained, adding that he hopes this exhibition “helps resuscitate some of the original spirit of the greeting of peace.” 
What we’re left with is a tradition still in-progress. As a counter to the storied conditions of our social realities, such cooptation proves essential to our own perpetuity. In communicating the countless ways in which Black artists lay claim to these symbols as artifacts of ourselves, the exhibition offers a look at their nuanced circulation through a third eye. 

“Flight into Egypt” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until February 17, 2025. More

Essex-born artist and writer Stanley Donwood first met musician Thom Yorke when they were studying at the University of Exeter in the 1980s. Although they briefly lost touch after graduation, their paths crossed again in 1994, when Yorke asked Donwood to help him design a cover for The Bends, the second studio album of his up-and-coming rock band, Radiohead.
Their creative partnership was a tremendous success, with Donwood going on to design each and every one of Radiohead’s subsequent album covers. In 2025, his creative process will be laid bare in a new art exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford titled “This is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke,” which will run from 8 August 2025 until 11 January 2026.
The first large-scale, public gallery exhibition of its kind, “This is What You Get” will not only showcase the finished album covers themselves, but also the work that went into designing them, including unused compositions, unpublished drawings, and never-before-seen song lyrics taken directly from Donwood’s own sketchbooks.
When Donwood first started working with Radiohead, he was working as an unpaid artist in an internet café out of the back of a bar. Although he didn’t have a computer, he volunteered to help Yorke put together a website for his band, something their record label—Parlophone—didn’t have much faith in at the time, considering the internet was still in its infancy.
Still, these kinds of initiatives paid off, as—according to music website Monster Children—Donwood’s role quickly evolved from “hired gun” into “an intrinsic part of the band” whose album covers are truly as “sweeping and complex as the records themselves.”
Anselm Kiefer is also getting a show at the Ashmolean next year. Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels.” Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio Ⓒ Anselm Kiefer.
Visitors of “This is What You Get” can expect to learn where Donwood gets his inspiration.
“The artwork for OK Computer was done in various places, but also at Thom’s house” the artist told Monster Children, taking its editors on a crash course through each Radiohead album he worked on. “He used to live in this little semi-detached suburban house with a view of some trees that was very nice. But I was in a bit of a dark place with making that artwork…” The final artwork’s mood is shaped by a surreal, almost apocalyptic vision of bare sticks and white ash.
Donwood’s album covers have since become as iconic and instantly recognizable as Yorke’s music, with framed reproductions adorning the dorm room walls of musically inclined college students across the world.
“This is What You Get” is one of several upcoming exhibitions at the Ashmolean dedicated to figures who the museum says have made “groundbreaking contributions to art, music and our contemporary cultural landscape.” Also planned for 2025 is “Anselm Kiefer: Early Works,” which—as the title suggest—will dive into the formative years of German artist Anselm Kiefer, a leading voice in the New Symbolism and Neo-Expressionist movements whose paintings recount significant events from German history. More

“Let them eat cake!” Whether or not Marie Antoinette truly uttered these infamous words, they have come to symbolize the extraordinary opulence of her life.
As Queen of France, her world was one of marbled palaces, lavish gowns, and glittering jewels, culminating in possessions so exquisite they continue to captivate centuries later.
Marie Antoinette’s possessions regularly smash records when they go up for auction, and not just because of their historical significance. As the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and wife of French King Louis XVI, Antoinette’s clothing and jewelry were designed by the finest craftsmen and made from the most expensive materials.
Her three-strand pearl necklace, made up of 119 saltwater and freshwater pearls, sold for $2.2 million, while one of her many collections of diamonds went under the hammer for $9.3 million. One of her most cherished possessions, a pendant, raised a mind-boggling $36 million when Sotheby’s put it up for sale.
However, these items pale in comparison to her long-lost watch. Soon on display at the Science Museum in London as part of their “Versailles: Science and Splendour” exhibition, which explores scientific innovations sponsored by the French royal court, the No. 160 Marie Antoinette—as this timepiece is now referred to—fits the late queen’s exuberant style, sporting decorations of sapphire, platinum, ruby, and gold, as well as a crystal dial.
The No. 160 Marie Antoinette in all its glory. Photo: David Silverman/Getty Images.
Designed without a budget and comprised of no less than 823 moving parts, its creator is none other than Prussian watch wizard Abraham-Louis Breguet, whose Breguet company—now part of the Swiss Swatch Group—has been popular with European nobility for centuries.
The No. 160 Marie Antoinette may well be Breguet’s best work. In addition to sounding the hours, minutes, and seconds, a commendable feat for the time in which it was created, the watch came with a thermometer, a second hand that could be used as a stopwatch, and a calendar that corrected for leap years—features that earned it the nickname “the grand contraption.”
Considered the most valuable watch on the face of the Earth, one need not imagine the shock  when—in April 1983—employees of the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art awoke to find its display case smashed, and it missing alongside 106 other rare and antique watches.
The No. 160 remained missing for nearly two decades until 2004, when the thief, overcome with remorse in his final days, revealed its location—returning the masterpiece to the world and restoring its place in horological history. Now the watch is heading to London—its first international trip after being returned to L.A. Mayer in 2008.
While the No. 160 watch eventually found its way back into the spotlight, Marie Antoinette’s own story ended long before its completion. Commissioned in 1783, the watch wasn’t finished until 1827, after both Breguet and the Queen had passed—leaving behind a legacy of elegance and extravagance that still dazzles today. More

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is marking the artist’s 100th birthday with a slate of international events and exhibitions, as well as a series of grant-making initiatives. Launching in 2025 and continuing through 2026, the centennial activities will aim to highlight Rauschenberg’s forward-thinking ideas on art, technology, environmentalism, and social justice.
A genre-spanning giant of American postwar art, Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, is best known for his iconic “Combines” that blend the disciplines of painting and sculpture. He was also a firm believer in art as a catalyst for social change.
“Rauschenberg’s work broke boundaries and embraced the spirit of experimentation—qualities that remain profoundly relevant to artists and society today,” said Courtney J. Martin, the foundation‘s director. “This milestone allows us to reengage with his vision through fresh perspectives, reaffirming his role as a catalyst for innovation, and a beacon for social progress.”
The artist’s Stoned Moon Book (1970) will be included in “Five Friends.” Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
The foundation has helped organize major exhibitions of his work at seven institutions across five countries. The first of these is “Five Friends,” which will go on view at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Germany in April 2025 before traveling to Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, which was the largest collector of his art in Europe while he was alive. It highlights Rauschenberg’s collaborations with other major artists of the time, including Cy Twombly, John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Merce Cunningham.
“This show really talks about that postwar period and the fact that there is this group between Abstract Expressionism and minimalism and that they share relationships with both camps,” Martin said. “But they’re also really doing their own thing. They’re the successors to one, the precursors of the other.”
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns at Louis and Fance Stevenson’s home“somewhere up the Hudson”, 1954. Photo: Rachel Rosenthal, Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Two concurrent exhibitions will pay tribute to the artist’s use of photography, which began with his time at Black Mountain College between 1948 and 1952 and continued as his career gained steam during the mid-1950s in New York. “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World,” opening in September at the Museum of the City of New York will be followed by “The Use of Images,” opening in October at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, which brought the first exhibit of Rauschenberg’s work to Spain in 1985.
Martin also noted that the artist’s extensive travels in Asia influenced his practice, from multiple trips to Japan beginning in the mid-1960s to a residency in India in 1975 and beyond. This theme runs through an upcoming exhibition at M+ in Hong Kong, opening in November 2025. The show is rooted in a program Rauschenberg personally developed shortly after his first trip to China in the 1980s, called the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), which was an effort to spark international dialogue using art.
Robert Rauschenberg, New York (1983).
“He was one of the first Western artists to show in China and becomes a huge influence for a generation of Chinese artists in the 1980s,” Martin said. “Just to give you a sense of what that would mean, many of those artists saw Rauschenberg before they saw Picasso.”
Other confirmed institutional exhibitions marking the artist’s centenary include “Fabric Works from the 1970s” at the Menil Collection in Houston (September 19, 2025–March 1, 2026), which explores his interest in dance and costuming, and “Image and Gesture” at Austria’s Kunsthalle Krems (March–October 2026).
Robert Rauschenberg, Mirage (Jammer), 1975. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photo: Ron Amstutz
While one aspect of the foundation’s work is to support Rauschenberg’s legacy through research and exhibitions, another is philanthropically supporting the causes he held dear. Rauschenberg started an organization called Change Inc., which aimed to provide artists with direct monetary support through perils including medical and housing emergencies, as well as the loss of their studios.
To further the artist’s philanthropic spirit, the foundation will fund a round of centennial grants. To date, 22 institutions are confirmed to receive support related to programming, scholarship, and restoration. Among the recipients are Guild Hall and the Trisha Brown Dance Company in New York, the Honolulu Museum of Art, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Several academic museums have also received grants, such as New York University’s Grey Art Museum and the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska. Other institutional grants and gifts will be announced in the coming months.
Robert Rauschenberg working on the Short Stories series at his studio,2000. Photo: Ed Chappell, ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
The foundation is also launching the first volume in its pioneering digital catalog raisonné and the first book collecting writings by Rauschenberg. A new book of Rauschenberg’s writings will debut in October, titled I Don’t Think About Being Great: Select Statements and Writings. Rauschenberg himself had set aside most of the selected writings before his death, Martin said.
“He did not publish any writing in his lifetime about his own work. So, this is really, truly revelatory,” she said. “One of the things that emerges out of our book is that Rauschenberg was incredibly funny.” The publication is spearheaded by Francine Snyder, the foundation’s archivist, and will also include writings by artist Martha Tuttle. More

In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, the first aircraft to fly through the sun’s upper atmosphere. It’s still up there, orbiting the sun, moving closer and closer, facing—as NASA’s website dramatically puts it—“brutal heat and radiation to provide humanity with unprecedented observations, visiting the only star we can study up close.”
A five-minute video of the rocket launching into the heavens is the first thing you see when you enter “Solid Gold,” the new exhibit that runs through July 6 at the Brooklyn Museum. This found footage sets the tone for an expansive, trippy show dedicated to the precious metal the Incas poetically called “the tears of the sun.” A pair of blindingly shiny outfits by the Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck stand nearby like sentries; they’re from his 2023 “Icarus” collection, named after the figure in Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun.
teamLab. Gold Waves, (2017). © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery.
About half of the show’s 500 objects come from the museum’s collection: ancient coins, Renaissance altar pieces, Japanese screens, shimmering couture dresses. The millennia-spanning exhibition commemorates the museum’s 200th birthday, a showcase for its vast holdings. “The idea came up about doing a show about one medium in the collection for its anniversary,” senior curator Matthew Yokobosky said during a preview last week. “And we had 4,000 works that are gold or have a gold element to them.”
But this isn’t some straightforward survey exhibition. It’s freewheeling, discursive, dizzying: jammed with many ideas and twinkling trinkets. “It is like looking at the sun,” Yokobosky mused. “Gold is always going to have some primordial attraction for us. We might not be able to verbalize why it is so dazzling, but it’s in there somewhere.” “Solid Gold” considers the subject in all its permutations: as an element, material, color, and symbol—of beauty, spirituality, wealth, and power, but also greed, hubris, and excess.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
The story—as the Brooklyn Museum presents it, using and forgoing chronology per its discretion—starts a long, long time ago: when ancient peoples discovered these shiny yellow flecks in river beds and streams. It took thousands of years of water eroding the rock to produce these gold particles, but to its earliest fans, it must have seemed like magic.
The ancient Egyptians believed it to be the “flesh of the gods.” The bulk of the exhibit’s first gallery centers around Egypt’s gold obsession, spanning both genuine artifacts, like a coffin adorned with gold chains, as well as contemporary homages. I liked jeweler Gabby Elan’s golden grillz from the 2000s, but John Galliano’s draggy lamé-and-lurex Egyptomania costumes that he designed for Christian Dior in 2004 now read as cheesy (even compared with the ridiculous necklaces Elizabeth Taylor wore in the 1963 biopic Cleopatra). A 2020 Balenciaga number resembles a crumpled Ferrero Rocher wrapper.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
The next room instructs viewers where gold comes from, the various (lucrative, often exploitative, and environmentally hazardous) ways we extract it, and how goldsmiths and artisans work with it. “You can do a lot with a little gold,” Yokobosky said. “It lasts forever. It doesn’t tarnish. It doesn’t rust. You can pound it and it doesn’t get brittle. It’s malleable. And it has so many meanings.”
Still, the metal never really shed its divine associations. Hindus crafted sculptures of their deities in gold. Muslims adorned their mosques and religious artifacts with it. Christians were initially skeptical of the stuff but then used gold leaf to give their altar pieces and holy pictures a heavenly glow. Some Catholic priests wore vestments woven from gold thread, to signal their godly status. There’s a stunning embroidered example from the mid-18th century; in the church’s dark candlelight it would have made its wearer glisten. In the dark ages, gold did provide sparkle and entertainment. Gleaming chalices, glimmering altarpieces, and illuminated prayer books made going to church a hell of a lot more interesting.
Nardo di Cione. Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Zenobius, John the Baptist, Reparata and John the Evangelist (mid-14th century). Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
Gold “tinkles, it’s not static,” Yokobosky said. In a darkened chapel, “by the flickering of candlelight, it would have been like an early movie.”
Contemporary artists have played with gold’s religious associations in profound, sometimes subversive ways. The painter Titus Kaphar, for example, uses gold leaf for his luminous portraits of incarcerated Black men, painting them like Byzantine Christian icons. One of his diptychs is presented in “Solid Gold,” hanging in a dark room full of ground-gold religious paintings from Renaissance Italy. Later, past several rooms devoted to gold in fashion, in a spare white gallery, Marc Quinn’s 28-karat gold sculpture of Kate Moss in a pretzel-shaped yoga pose (Siren) sits among a smattering of Buddha sculptures—a new icon for our increasingly celebrity-worshiping culture.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
So much gold, however, can veer into bad taste. Among the oodles of jewelry and fashions, I couldn’t help but think of Trump’s gaudy gilded temples to greed and excess, of prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet (entitled America), of the chemicals factories use to produce cheap sequins for mass-produced clothes and costumes. That’s the fascinating thing about gold. On one hand, it’s rare, precious, beautiful, everlasting. On the other, it’s kind of tacky. “Solid Gold” features some transcendent works of art and some ersatz trash. But that’s okay, even correct.
Hanging, France or Italy (circa 17th century). Silk, gilt metal, silver, and linen. Brooklyn Museum
There were two pieces in the show that wonderfully illustrated this tension between gold’s loftiness and its baseness. One was Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mixed-media sculpture Golden Venus of the Rags, from the late 1960s—featuring, yes, a golden statue of the goddess facing a pile of discarded clothing. The other was a draped silk ensemble by Canadian designer Claudio Cina, featuring a digitally printed collage of classical sculptures set against a background inspired by the swimming pool tiles of the famously overly-ostentatious Hearst Castle.
Yokobosky agreed: “When I saw that, I was like, ‘This is perfect!’” More

Lost artworks exert an almost ghostly power over the art historical imagination. One need only call to mind the dramatically empty frames hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or the penetrating gaze of lost Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man,  known today only through reproduction, to have a sense of this spectral power.
Adrian Ghenie, Auferstehung (2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation.
Now, an evocative new exhibition “Adrian Ghenie—Shadow Paintings” at the Albertina in Vienna, dives deep into the psychological complexities of lost art (on view through March 2, 2025). For the exhibition, the Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie offers his visceral, often brutal responses to three lost masterworks by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, works known as his “shadow paintings.” All three paintings are double self-portraits by the artist, which went missing during World War II and have remained missing for nearly 80 years. These paintings are now only known through grainy black-and-white photographs reproduced in a 1911 publication. Still, the might of these paintings has been powerful through their very absence, which Ghenie here examined.
The genesis for this exhibition was conceived by the collector and philanthropist Ciprian Adrian Barsan, who is known as C.A.B. The collector was moved by Ghenie’s masterpiece The Crucifixion on view at the Chiesa della Madonna della Mazza in Palermo and proposed the exhibition to the museum. “He used it as a conceptual anchor to conceive the idea of lost shadow paintings as a rebellious answer against fixed, regulated, plagiarized images embedded within our ghosts of perception, trapped in the paralyzed mimesis of the past that they seek to express,” explained a representative of the museum in an email.
Egon Schiele, Auferstehung. As seen in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s Egon Schiele. Versuch einer Vorrede, Wien, (1911) Photo © Kallir Research Institute.
The paintings on view are not homages to Schiele as much as Ghenie’s adaptation and response to the ways Schiele contorted and transformed depictions of the self in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In the painting Self-Seer (1910) for instance, Schiele presents two sinewy visions of himself, nude, kneeling, one behind the other. The figures are desexed and androgynous while remaining, as was always the case with Schiele, sexually provocative. This painting, in particular, is often interpreted as the struggle between the artist and depiction of the self.
Adrian Ghenie, Studie Nach Die Selbstseher (2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation.
Ghenie was given no confines in how he chose to respond to Schiele’s “shadow paintings” and was asked only to evoke a “presence of absence.” There are parallels between the artists, however. “Ghenie and Schiele share an intense examination of the human body through a raw, disturbing, beautiful aesthetic. Both artists broke away from the imitation of real forms and anatomical accuracy, striving for an authentic, independent visual language,” the museum added.
Egon Schiele, Die Selbstseher. As seen in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s Egon Schiele. Versuch einer Vorrede, Wien, (1911) Photo © Kallir Research Institute.
In his own way, Ghenie captures the psychological and existential torque and even chaos that Schiele metabolized into his daring images; just as Schiele contorts and twists his likeness in these shadow paintings, here Ghenie morphs Schiele’s language so that the human figure becomes alien, surrounded by objects of our contemporary moment. These are wholly new images.
Adrian Ghenie, Niender Maennlicher akt mit Erhobenen Haendenr(2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation.
Even so, Ghenie’s paintings remain psychologically shadowed by Schiele’s works through their very absence. The tension between these works can, as the museum said, “create a mirror in which we confront not only the conflicts arising from the fixation on imitation but also the confrontation with the shadows within our own ghost.” In this way, Ghenie builds on the spirit of rebellion that defined Schiele, refusing to imitate while acknowledging their spectral presence.
Egon Schiele, Die Weltwehmut. As seen in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s Egon Schiele. Versuch einer Vorrede, Wien, (1911) Photo © Kallir Research Institute.
Adrian Ghenie, Weltwehmut (2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation. More

If pushed to name three Renaissance artists (or three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael are probably most people’s picks (sorry, Donatello). The three giants of the Renaissance are coming together in a new show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, which examines their relationships with one another both personally and professionally during their shared lifetimes at the turn of the 16th century.
Leonardo was the eldest of the masters, born in Florence in 1452. He was a month off 23 when Michelangelo was born in Tuscany and 31 by the time Raphael came along in Urbino. There would only be 36 years where all three coincided on this planet, and just 20 years when all three were in adulthood.
Install shot of “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael” (2024). Photo: © David Parry / Royal Academy of Arts.
Their relationships were laden with competition, as all were vying for commissions by powerful Florentine and Roman patrons. Michelangelo and Leonardo competed for the attention of the powerful Medici family, and after Raphael emerged on the scene he and Michelangelo fought for commissions from Pope Julius II. Michelangelo belittled the achievements of his younger rival after his early death, claiming, “everything he learned he learned from me.”
In “Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael,” the Royal Academy is showcasing some of the finest examples of Italian Renaissance drawing in the world. The exhibition has been organized in partnership with London’s National Gallery and the Royal Collection Trust, whose current exhibition “Drawing the Italian Renaissance” also features work by the three masters.
More than 40 works by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo are on display in London, and we took a deeper look at three works, one by each of the Renaissance rivals, all three unfinished and each a depiction of the Virgin Mary with Jesus and the Infant Saint John the Baptist.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The “Taddei Tondo”), c. 1504–05
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The “Taddei Tondo”), c. 1504–05. Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
The Taddei Tondo—nicknamed after Taddeo Taddei, the wealthy cloth merchant who commissioned it—is the focal point of “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael,” and the key artwork in the narrative of the exhibition’s accompanying book. The carving shows the infant Saint John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, offering his young relative a bird, designed as a symbol of the Passion of Christ and a foreshadowing of Jesus’ crucifixion. The tondo (a round artwork) is incomplete, likely because of a new commission which saw Michelangelo travel to Rome to create the tomb for Pope Julius II.
In Lives of the Artists, Vasari’s groundbreaking biographical art history (1550), the author mentions how the Taddei Tondo and a second marble tondo intended for patron Bartolomeo Pitti were both “roughed out but left unfinished.” The fact that Taddei’s commission hung in his house (and remained there until the early 19th century) despite being unfinished was testament to the quality of the piece, made by a 31-year-old Michelangelo at the height of his fame.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Burlington House Cartoon”), c. 1506–08
Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Burlington House Cartoon”), c. 1506–08. Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Held in the collection of London’s National Gallery since 1791, the Burlington House Cartoon is the focus of the central gallery of the show. (Its name refers to the address of the Royal Academy itself, at Burlington House in central London.) Cartoons—full-size drawings created in preparation for paintings of frescos—would typically feature evidence of having been traced over or pin-pricked as part of the process of transferring the design from a sheet of paper to a wall, but the Burlington House Cartoon shows no such marks.
This suggests that the drawing was designed as a final artwork itself, and it highlights the importance of drawing in Renaissance artistic practices. The only evidence of manipulation shown on the drawing is that the cartoon is made up of several smaller sheets of paper glued together, due simply to the fact that sheets this large (about 56 inches high) were not available in the early 16th century. In the drawing, Mary, Jesus, and John are joined by Saint Anne, Mary’s mother. Certain areas are left unfinished, including Saint Anne’s arm, but the faces are completed in great detail using charcoal and chalk, with a softening sfumato technique (derived from the Italian word sfumare, meaning “to tone down” or “evaporate like smoke”), which is mostly closely associated with Leonardo and his followers.
Raphael, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (‘The Esterhazy Madonna’), c. 1508
Raphael, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Esterhazy Madonna”), c. 1508. Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
The Esterhazy Madonna is testimony to an exciting point in Raphael’s life and career. It was begun in 1508, when the young artist was living in Florence, and was completed in Rome after Raphael was asked to travel there by Pope Julius II. The natural landscape is typically Florentine, but ancient Roman ruins have been added into the background. Art historians see this work as a marker of the end of Raphael’s Florentine period, and the beginning of his work in Rome, which was more adventurous when it came to stepping away from 15th-century standards of compositional harmony.
On loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, the painting was previously in the collection of 18th-century Prince Esterházy, who gave the work its nickname. The Esterhazy Madonna is also evidence of the exchange of ideas between Renaissance masters, with the Virgin Mary’s pose taking direct inspiration from a work by Leonardo, itself made after an ancient sculpture.
“Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael” is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London through 16 February 2025. More