Albrecht Dürer, St. Eustace, Paumgartner alterpiece, 1503.

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo who has labeled it “St. Hubert”. The Roman St. Eustace shares essentially the same conversion story with the later St. Hubert of the Ardennes. Both saw a vision of crucifix between the antlers of a hunted stag. Both are patron saints of hunters.

Edgar Ende, Die Brennende Fahne, 1934, private collection

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

Andrei Franzowitsch Belloli, Judith, 1872, Formerly the collection of an Italian noble family, sold at MacDougall’s, London, May 27, 2012.

Look out, Holophernes!

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

John William Waterhouse, The Favorites of the Emperor Honorius, 1883, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Via Ratak Monodosico.

The Telegraph reports big news in the art world.

a 500-year-old mystery was apparently solved today after a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was discovered in a Swiss bank vault.

The painting, which depicts Isabella d’Este, a Renaissance noblewoman, was found in a private collection of 400 works kept in a Swiss bank by an Italian family who asked not to be identified.

It appears to be a completed, painted version of a pencil sketch drawn by Leonardo da Vinci in Mantua in the Lombardy region of northern Italy in 1499.

The sketch, the apparent inspiration for the newly found work, hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

For centuries it had been debated whether Leonardo had actually had the time or inclination to develop the sketch into a painted portrait.

After seeing the drawing he produced, the marquesa wrote to the artist, imploring him to produce a full-blown painting.

But shortly afterwards he embarked on one of his largest works, The Battle of Anghiari on the walls of Florence’s town hall, and then, in 1503, started working on the Mona Lisa.

Art historians had long believed he simply ran out of time — or lost interest — in completing the commission for Isabella d’Este.

Now it appears that he did in fact manage to finish the project — perhaps when he encountered the aristocrat, one of the most influential female figures of her day, in Rome in 1514.

Scientific tests suggest that the oil portrait is indeed the work of da Vinci, according to Carlo Pedretti, a professor emeritus of art history and an expert in Leonardo studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“There are no doubts that the portrait is the work of Leonardo,” Prof Pedretti, a recognised expert in authenticating disputed works by Da Vinci, told Corriere della Sera newspaper.

“I can immediately recognise Da Vinci’s handiwork, particularly in the woman’s face.”

Tests have shown that the type of pigment in the portrait was the same as that used by Leonardo and that the primer used to treat the canvas on which it was painted corresponds to that employed by the Renaissance genius.

Carbon dating, conducted by a mass spectrometry laboratory at the University of Arizona, has shown that there is a 95 per cent probability that the portrait was painted between 1460 and 1650.

Alex J. Jeffries, Vegetable Dr Oz

Compare:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Portrait of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor painted as Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons, c. 1590-1591. Skokloster Castle, Sweden.

Smithsonian magazine: “Arcimboldo’s Feast for the Eyes.“

Louis-Simon Boizot, Meleager, Musée du Louvre, Paris; Meleager after Boizot, Léo Caillard and Alexis Persani, 2012. Street Stone Series

Street Stone series at Leo Caillard and Alexis Persani.

Parody version of Bernardino Luini, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, first half 16th century, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

From Vinerva.

Charles Piazzi Smyth, The Great Comet of 1843, 1843, National Maritime Museum, London

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

Arnold Böcklin, Roger and Angelica, 1871-1874, Nationalgalerie, Berlin

The guilty expressions on both the maiden’s and the monster’s faces are priceless. Clearly, “Roger” (better known as “Ruggiero”), in Böcklin’s imagination, was interrupting just as Angelica and the monster were “getting to know one other better.”

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

Albrecht Dürer, Fisherman’s House on a Lake near Nuremberg, c.1496

From wood s lot via Fred Lapides.

Boldini painting of grande horizontale subsequently sold at auction for £1.78 million

The Daily Mail describes a Belle Époque Parisian apartment, locked up at the time of the WWII German advance on the French capital which has remained unopened for over 70 years.

Inside the Paris apartment untouched for 70 years: Treasure trove finally revealed after owner locked up and fled at outbreak of WWII.

Caked in dust and full of turn-of-the century treasures, this Paris apartment is like going back in time.

Having lain untouched for seven decades the abandoned home was discovered three years ago after its owner died aged 91.

The woman who owned the flat, a Mrs De Florian, had fled for the south of France before the outbreak of the Second World War.

She never returned and in the 70 years since, it looks like no-one had set foot inside.

The property was found near a church in the French capital’s 9th arrondissement, between Pigalle red light district and Opera.

Experts were tasked with drawing up an inventory of her possessions which included a painting by the 19th century Italian artist Giovanni Boldini.

One expert said it was like stumbling into the castle of Sleeping Beauty, where time had stood still since 1900. ‘There was a smell of old dust,’ said Olivier Choppin-Janvry, who made the discovery.

But he said his heart missed a beat when he caught sight of a stunning tableau of a woman in a pink muslin evening dress.

The painting was by Boldini and the subject a beautiful Frenchwoman who turned out to be the artist’s former muse and Mrs de Florian’s grandmother, Marthe de Florian, a beautiful French actress and socialite of the Belle Époque.