Experts open tomb in Florence hoping to find Mona Lisa Experts open tomb in Florence hoping to find Mona Lisa World | Indo-Asian News Service | Updated: August 10, 2013 21:53 IST EMAIL PRINT COMMENTS London: Scientists in Italy's Florence city have opened a tomb to extract DNA in a highly ambitious bid to identify the model for Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa". The tomb reportedly contains the body of Lisa Gherardini, a silk merchant's wife who is believed to have sat for da Vinci, BBC said. Experts have been puzzled for centuries over the woman in the "Mona Lisa" painting, and the reason behind her cryptic smile. In a bid to find the DNA they needed, scientists cut a round hole in the stone church floor above the family crypt of silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Writer and researcher Silvano Vinceti plans to compare DNA from the bones with that of three women buried at the nearby convent of Saint Ursula, BBC said. Lisa Gherardini died in the convent as a nun in 1542. Experts hope some of the bones will belong to at least one of her blood relations, probably her son Piero.

"When we find a match between mother and child - then we will have found the Mona Lisa," said Vinceti. He said that once a DNA match is made, an image of Gherardini's face can be generated from the skull and compared with the painting. Da Vinci took about 15 years to complete the famous painting. One of his favourites, the artist carried it with him until he died in 1519. It was then acquired by King Francis I, who ruled France from 1515 to 1547. The painting was put on permanent display in the Louvre in Paris at the end of the 18th century. It was stolen in 1911 but was recovered two years later. Lisa Gherardini: Latest News, Photos, Videos on Lisa Gherardini - NDTV.COM Lisa Gherardini 'Hidden Portrait' Found Under Mona Lisa: French Scientist World News | Press Trust of India | Tuesday December 8, 2015 There is a portrait hidden beneath the existing painting Mona Lisa by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, a French scientist has claimed.

Experts open tomb in Florence hoping to find Mona Lisa World News | Indo-Asian News Service | Saturday August 10, 2013 Scientists in Italy's Florence city have opened a tomb to extract DNA in a highly ambitious bid to identify the model for Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa". CAA News | College Art Association » 2013 » August | CAA News from the Art and Academic Worlds posted by Christopher Howard Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives. Nineteen Lessons about Teaching 1. Teaching is a learning experience. Every time I teach a lesson, I learn the material in new and deeper way. I also always learn so much from my students. I learn from their own life experiences. I learn from their insights and reactions. They see aspects all the time in the sources we use that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise—and these are awesome teaching moments. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed .) New Infographic: Good News in Fair Use for Libraries A new infographic from the Association of Research Libraries tells the story of library fair use and the Code of Best Practices in a clear and compelling way.

There’s an embeddable PNG for your own blogs, and there’s also a print-ready 8½ x 11 inch version in case you need hardcopies to hand out at events. (Read more in ARL Policy Notes .) Building Digital Humanities Projects for Everyone Earlier this summer, the American Historical Association profiled a few recipients of National Endowment for the Humanities start-up grants to see what kinds of projects were emerging from the world of digital humanities with particular applications for historians. This month the organization caught up with a new cohort of implementation grantees, recently announced by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. (Read more from the American Historical Association .) Van Gogh in 3D? A Replica Could Be Yours for £22,000 A poster of one of Van Gogh’s sunflowers is one of the traditional adornments to a student bedroom. The rest of us hang our reproductions with the knowledge that even the good ones are far from faithful to the originals—for which the going rate is £24 million. But not anymore. The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam has developed high-quality 3D reproductions of some of its finest paintings, with what it describes as the most advanced copying technique ever seen.

(Read more in the Guardian .) The Real Neuroscience of Creativity You know how the left brain is realistic, analytical, practical, organized, and logical, and the right brain is creative, passionate, sensual, tasteful, colorful, vivid, and poetic? Thoughtful cognitive neuroscientists such as Rex Jung, Darya Zabelina, Andreas Fink, and others are on the forefront of investigating what actually happens in the brain during the creative process. And their findings are overturning conventional notions surrounding the neuroscience of creativity. (Read more in Scientific America .) The Benefits of Flipping Your Classroom A small but growing number of faculty at major universities are experimenting with the inverted or flipped classroom. It’s an instructional model popularized by, among other influences, a Ted Talk by the Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, which has received more than 2.5 million views. Institutions as varied as Duke University’s School of Medicine, Boston University’s College of Engineering, and the University of Washington School of Business are experimenting with changing from in-class lectures to video lectures and using class time to explore the challenging and more difficult aspects of course content.

(Read more from Faculty Focus .) Another Digital Divide More students are being disciplined for sharing incendiary remarks through social media, drawing outraged responses from peers who say online interactions don’t dictate offline behavior. Despite the conflicting ideas of how students should behave on the internet, social-media etiquette is almost never discussed during first-year orientation. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed .) Do Critics Paint Women Artists Out of the Picture? Is there a glass ceiling for women in the arts? A glance by a visiting alien would see twenty-first-century Britain as one of the best places and times ever for women working as artists. I went to Rome for my holidays and gorged on paintings, frescoes, and statues, from ancient Roman mosaics to Canova nudes. None of these great works of art of ages gone by is credited to a woman—which doesn’t mean there were no women artists at all before modern times. (Read more in the Guardian .) Extended Deadline for 2015 Annual Conference Session Proposals posted by Emmanuel Lemakis CAA invites individual members to propose a session for the 103rd Annual Conference, taking place February 11–14, 2015, in New York.

Proposals should cover the breadth of current thought and research in visual art, art and architectural history, theory and criticism, pedagogical issues, museum and curatorial practice, conservation, and developments in technology. For full details on the submission process for the conference, please review the information published on the Chair a 2015 Annual Conference Session webpage. The Annual Conference Committee welcomes session proposals from established artists and scholars, along with those from younger scholars, emerging and midcareer artists, and graduate students. Particularly welcome are proposals that highlight interdisciplinary work. Artists are especially encouraged to propose sessions appropriate to dialogue and information exchange relevant to artists. The submission process for the 2015 conference is now open. In order to submit a proposal, you must be a current CAA member. Deadline extended to Tuesday, September 10, 2013. Image Caption A. Major, Bird’s-Eye View of the Great New York and Brooklyn Bridge, and Grand Display of Fireworks on Opening Night … May 24, 1883, 1883, color lithograph, 18⅞ x 26¼ in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (artwork in the public domain).

Recent Deaths in the Arts posted by Christopher Howard In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, historians, educators, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. Notable deaths this summer include four major internationally known artists: Ruth Asawa, Walter De Maria, León Ferrari, and Allan Sekula. In addition, CAA has published special obituaries on the Asian American art historian Sadayoshi “Sada” Omoto and the eminent Russian scholar Dmitrii V. Sarabianov . Ruth Asawa , an artist based in San Francisco who created abstract sculpture, including intricate hanging wire pieces and several public fountains, passed away on August 6, 2013. She was 87 years old Ronnie Cutrone , an artist and an assistant to Andy Warhol in the Factory from 1972 into the early 1980s, died on July 21, 2013.

He was 65 Walter De Maria , a sculptor best known for his large-scale outdoor work The Lightning Field and indoor pieces such as The New York Earth Room and The Broken Kilometer, died on July 25, 2013. He was 77 years old León Ferrari , an Argentine artist known for provocative work that addressed war, religion, power, and sex, died on July 25, 2013. He was 92 years old Betty Jones , a conservator of paintings at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum and for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, died on May 20, 2013, at age 94. She was instrumental in recovery efforts in Venice after the city was flooded in 1966 Ben Lifson , a writer, curator, and photographer, passed away on July 3, 2013, at the age of 72.

Lifson served as photography critic for the Village Voice from 1977 to 1982 Larry Nowlan , a realist sculptor based in New Hampshire known for his bronze statue of the actor Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, sited outside New York’s Port Authority, died on July 30, 2013. He was 48 years old Sadayoshi “Sada” Omoto , a historian of American and Asian art who taught at Michigan State University for thirty-three years, died on March 4, 2013, at the age of 90. A special obituary on the scholar has been published by CAA John Reilly , the founder of a New York theater for underground video called the Global Village, died on July 28, 2013, age 74.

Reilly financed documentary films and created his own, including Waiting for Beckett (1993), while also teaching workshops on video production Alejandro Santiago , a Mexican artist who worked on a series of small statues called 2501 Migrantes from 2002 to 2008, passed away on July 22, 2013. He was 49 years old Dmitrii V. Sarabianov , a Russian scholar who specialized in art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, passed away on July 19, 2013, age 89. CAA has published a special obituary on the eminent art historian Allan Sekula , an artist, photographer, writer, and longtime professor at California Institute of the Arts, died on August 10, 2013. He was 62 years old. Last year CAA honored Sekula with its Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art Jud Yalkut , a film and video artist based in Dayton, Ohio, died on July 23, 2013, at the age of 75.

He founded the film and video program at Wright State University in 1973 and also taught at Sinclair Community College and Xavier University Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard , CAA managing editor, for the next list. News from the Art and Academic Worlds posted by Christopher Howard Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives. Almanac of Higher Education 2013 The Chronicle of Higher Education takes the measure of higher education in its 2013–14 almanac, an annual compendium of data on colleges regarding the profession, students, diversity, finance, technology, and international issues. This year’s almanac features many new tables and charts along with the familiar ones. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education .) A Guide to the Web’s Growing Set of Free Image Collections The J. Paul Getty Trust has launched its Open Content Program, making more than 4,600 high-quality images of artwork available for free online.

Though works by van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Dürer had already fallen into the public domain, the Getty’s program makes their digital reproductions much easier to use. The Getty is not the first museum to put so many images online this year. The Atlantic has listed the museums and research institutions that have large, high-quality, free-to-use collections of historically or aesthetically notable images online. (Read more in the Atlantic ). Help Desk: Pressure to Review I’m a new arts administrator and live in a midsized city. I started writing art reviews last year and now feel pressure to write about my artist friends’ work. It’s not like they are asking me directly, but hints have been dropped. I have no problem reviewing work that I think is good; the problem is that I like some people very much but don’t think their work is that great. How do I avoid reviewing work I don’t like without losing my friends? (Read more in Daily Serving .) Christie’s Appraisal Will Reveal Value of Detroit Institute of Arts’ Collection Art museums treat estimated values of their art like state secrets.

In fact, major museums such as the Detroit Institute of Arts don’t even know precisely what all of their multi-million-dollar treasures are worth. When officials from the New York–based auction house Christie’s finish formally appraising city-owned works in Detroit this fall, the results will open an unprecedented public window into the market value of thousands of artworks at a top American museum. (Read more in the Detroit Free Press .) Feminist Anti-MOOC At first glance, “Feminism and Technology” sounds like another massive open online open course (MOOC) that would involve video components and be available online to anyone, with no charge. But don’t look for this course in any MOOC catalogue. “Feminism and Technology” is taking a few MOOC elements but then changing them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course (DOCC). (Read more from Inside Higher Ed .) More Smiles? More Money Last November, the artist Martha Rosler had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, an installation and performance piece called Meta-Monumental Garage Sale.

It was, in fact, an enormous garage sale, with heaps of toys, furniture, clothes, and crockery arranged on a tidy maze of racks and tables winding through the museum’s main atrium. The show continued a project Rosler began in 1973 with Monumental Garage Sale, a performance she staged as a graduate student at UC San Diego and later re-created in museums all over the world. Like its predecessors, Meta-Monumental Garage Sale was a meditation on value. (Read more from N+1 .) Jasper Johns’s Assistant Charged with Stealing the Artist’s Work In the twenty-seven years that James Meyer worked for Jasper Johns, the assistant answered the artist’s phone, stretched his canvases, bought his paintbrushes, and even drew lines on his canvases. Meyer was recently arrested for stealing at least twenty-two works from his employer and selling them through an unnamed New York gallery for $6.5 million, falsely telling the dealer and buyers that Johns had given them to him as presents and that they would be in the official catalogue raisonné.

(Read more in New York Times .) Pre-Raphaelite Mural Discovered in William Morris’s Red House It began as an attempt to restore one blurry image that had been hidden for a century behind a large built-in wardrobe on William Morris’s bedroom wall. Months later, the painstaking removal of layers of paint and wallpaper revealed that an entire wall at the artist and craftsman’s first married home was painted by his young friends who would become world-famous Pre-Raphaelite artists. (Read more in the Guardian .) Exhibitor and Advertiser Prospectus for the 2014 Annual Conference posted by Paul Skiff The Exhibitor and Advertiser Prospectus for the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago is now available for download. Featuring essential details for participation in the Book and Trade Fair, the booklet also contains options for sponsorship opportunities and advertisements in conference publications and on the conference website. The Exhibitor and Advertiser Prospectus will help you reach a core audience of artists, art historians, educators, students, and administrators, who will converge in Chicago for CAA’s 102nd Annual Conference, taking place February 12–15, 2014.

With three days of exhibit time, the Book and Trade Fair will be centrally located at the Hilton Chicago Hotel, where all programs sessions and special events take place. CAA offers several options for booths and tables that can help you to connect with conference attendees in person. The priority deadline for Book and Trade Fair applications is Thursday, October 31, 2013; the final deadline for all applications and full payments is Monday, December 9, 2013. In addition, sponsorship packages will allow you to maintain a high profile throughout the conference. Companies, organizations, and publishers may choose one of four visibility packages, sponsor specific areas and events such as the Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge, or work with CAA staff to design a custom package. Advertising possibilities include the Conference Program, distributed to approximately five thousand registrants, and the conference website, seen by tens of thousands more. The final deadline for sponsorships and advertisements in the Conference Program is Friday, December 6, 2013. Questions about the 2014 Book and Trade Fair? Please contact Paul Skiff , CAA assistant director for Annual Conference, at 212-392-4412.

For sponsorship and advertising queries, speak to Virginia Reinhart , CAA marketing and communications associate, at 212-392-4426. Travel Grants for the 2014 Annual Conference posted by Lauren Stark CAA offers Annual Conference Travel Grants to graduate students in art history and studio art and to international artists and scholars. In addition, the Getty Foundation has funded the second year of a program that enables twenty applicants from outside the United States to attend the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago. Applicants may apply for more than one grant but can only receive a single award. CAA Graduate Student Conference Travel Grant CAA will award a limited number of $250 Graduate Student Conference Travel Grants to advanced PhD and MFA graduate students as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to attend the 102nd Annual Conference, taking place February 12–15, 2014, in Chicago. To qualify for the grant, students must be current CAA members. Successful applicants will also receive complimentary conference registration. Deadline: September 13, 2013.

CAA International Member Conference Travel Grant CAA will award a limited number of $500 International Member Conference Travel Grants to artists and scholars from outside the United States as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to attend the 102nd Annual Conference, taking place February 12–15, 2014, in Chicago. To qualify for the grant, applicants must be current CAA members. Successful applicants will also receive complimentary conference registration. Deadline: September 13, 2013. CAA International Travel Grant Program The CAA International Travel Grant Program , generously supported by the Getty Foundation, provides funding to twenty art historians, museum curators, and artists who teach art history to attend the 102nd Annual Conference, taking place February 12–15, 2014, in Chicago. The grant covers travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships. The program also includes a one-day preconference meeting to be held on February 11, providing grant recipients and their hosts with the opportunity to address their common professional interests and issues. Applicants do not need to be CAA members. Deadline extended: August 23, 2013.

Donate to the Annual Conference Travel Grants CAA’s Annual Conference Travel Grants are funded solely by donations from CAA members—please contribute today. Charitable contributions are 100 percent tax deductible. CAA extends a warm thanks to those members who made voluntary contributions to this fund during the past twelve months. Image Caption Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, 35⅞ x 49 in. National Gallery, London (artwork in the public domain). News from the Art and Academic Worlds posted by Christopher Howard Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives. Florence Tomb Opened in Quest to Find “Mona Lisa” Scientists in the Italian city of Florence have opened a tomb to extract DNA they hope will identify the model for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The tomb contains the family of Lisa Gherardini, a silk merchant’s wife who is believed to have sat for the artist. It is hoped that DNA will help to identify her from three skeletons found last year in a nearby convent.

(Read more from BBC News .) Open Content: An Idea Whose Time Has Come The Getty has become an even more engaged digital citizen, one that shares its collections, research, and knowledge more openly than ever before. The institution has launched the Open Content Program to share—freely and without restriction—as many of its digital resources as possible. The program’s initial focus is to make available all images of public-domain artworks in the Getty’s collections. (Read more in the Getty Iris .) Judge Upholds Artist’s Right to Photograph Unsuspecting Neighbors New York’s Supreme Court has decided that the photographer Arne Svenson was within his rights to display and advertise a series of photographs he took of his neighbors without their permission. In May, a couple sued Svenson for violating their privacy after recognizing their young children in two of the images. The judge dismissed the suit, writing that the family’s right to privacy “yields to an artist’s protections under the First Amendment in the circumstances presented here.” (Read more in the Art Newspaper .) What’s a Blog Post Worth?

Which ultimately does more good: an article or monograph that is read by twenty or thirty people in a narrow field, or a blog post on a topic of interest to many (such as grading standards or tenure requirements) that is read by 200,000? What if the post spurs hundreds of comments, is debated publicly in faculty lounges and classrooms, and gets picked up by newspapers and websites across the country—in other words, it helps to shape the national debate over some hot-button issue? (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education .) A Mentoring Manifesto “Transformative,” “career-changing,” and “life-altering”: are these words that tenure-track faculty members in your department use to describe the mentoring they receive? In this final column in the series on “How to Mentor New Faculty,” I want to lay out the biggest lessons that my department has learned about mentoring and encourage you to imagine how they might apply to your campus environment. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed .) A Page from Our Handbook: Writing about Your Work Many of the materials you produce on behalf of your work—from artist’s statements to media releases to proposals to simple emails—involve a good bit of writing.

In some cases you are writing about a project or series that you haven’t yet made. What you need to know in a nutshell is this: writing about your work is essential, but you can find a way to make it great, useful, more fun, and easier. (Read more from Creative Capital .) The Utility of Bad Art The father of consumer choice theory, Alfred Marshall, believed that the more of something you have the less of it you want: a phenomenon economists call diminishing marginal utility. However this was only taken to be the case for an individual at one point in time, not over his entire life. Addiction could prompt us to learn to like something if we consume more of it. The more we listen to good music, the more we want to buy. Modern economists are more skeptical about our aesthetic judgment. (Read more in the Economist .) Ten of the Most Expensive Artworks on Amazon Art Amazon has embarked on what might be its classiest endeavor yet: a fine-arts marketplace. Yes, the internet’s behemoth middleman is working with more than 150 galleries and 4,500 artists to offer a wide variety of paintings, photographs, and mixed-media masterpieces to online shopping addicts everywhere.

While critics have been quick to comment on the strange partnership between a giant internet marketplace and the insular fine-arts world, this gallery experiment could have a positive impact. (Read more in the Huffington Post .) caa.reviews Publishes Multimedia Project on Bernini Exhibition posted by Christopher Howard Celebrating its fifteenth anniversary as a born-digital journal this fall, caa.reviews continues its exploration of the scholarly review medium through “ Exhibitions Close Up—Bernini: Sculpting in Clay .” This multimedia, open-access project focuses on the recent exhibition that assembles over forty small terra-cotta models made by the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini to visualize large sculptures. The project was made possible through a grant to CAA from the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Conceived by Sheryl Reiss, editor-in-chief of caa.reviews, and broadened through discussion with the journal’s editorial board, the project explores the Bernini exhibition in several ways. It provides a traditional scholarly review of the presentation at both its venues—the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas—and a review by the sculptor Denise Pelletier.

Central to the project is a video walk-through at the Kimbell that juxtaposes close views of Bernini’s terra-cotta models with physical movement within the gallery spaces and around the objects on display, giving the viewer a close approximation of visiting the exhibition in person. The project—which also includes a bibliography, previously published essays on and reviews of Bernini’s work and methods from The Art Bulletin and caa.reviews, additional educational videos about the artist’s work, the Kimbell floor plan of the exhibition, comparative illustrations showing completed pieces, and an interview with C. D. Dickerson, curator of European art at the Kimbell—provides a comprehensive resource for Bernini’s oeuvre and influence as well as an in-depth look at an important monographic exhibition. The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC) developed the Scalar digital authoring platform with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Art Bulletin also used this platform for an anniversary project launched in February 2013, called “ Publishing The Art Bulletin: Past, Present, and Future ,” that was developed by Thelma Thomas, (then) chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board and associate professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Additional projects using the Scalar platform can be viewed on the ANVC website . The minimum browser requirements for “ Exhibitions Close Up—Bernini: Sculpting in Clay ” are Internet Explorer 9.0, Firefox 4.0, Chrome 7.0, and Safari 5.0. August 2013 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts posted by Christopher Howard Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks , of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world. The CWA Picks for August 2013 consist of several excellent exhibitions of women artists in Europe and the United States: Linder Sterling in Hanover, Germany; Elaine Sturtevant and Dame Laura Knight in London, England; and Josephine Meckseper in Southampton, New York.

Also included are two important group shows: Mother Armenia in Yerevan, Armenia, and Autorotratti in Bologna, Italy. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring. Image Caption Dame Laura Knight, Self Portrait, 1913. National Portrait Gallery (artwork © Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA). News from the Art and Academic Worlds posted by Christopher Howard Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives. The Young Wellesley Professor Who Invented Contemporary Art When you think of the cities that helped define cutting-edge art in the twentieth century, you think of Paris, New York, maybe Berlin. In the standard histories, Boston plays a decidedly background role, with the city’s gatekeepers ensuring that the wild works by artists like Picasso, Braque, or Mondrian didn’t soil their elegant private and public collections.

“Boston is very dead so far as contemporary art is concerned,” complained a young Wellesley art-history instructor, Alfred Barr Jr., writing to a friend and gallery owner in New York in 1926, well after modernism had caught fire elsewhere. (Read more in the Boston Globe .) How to Build a Digital Humanities Took in a Week Twelve scholars convened at the George Mason University last week to build a web application for the digital humanities as part of the “One Week | One Tool” challenge, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The participants—who included web developers, faculty members, museum professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, and a high-school librarian—spent five days brainstorming, designing, and developing their tool. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education .) Arts Majors Jump Ahead of Tech Grads in Landing Jobs Here’s a surprise for college students: recent graduates with technology degrees are having a tougher time finding a job than their peers in the arts. The unemployment rate for recent grads with a degree in information systems is more than double that of drama and theater majors, at 14.7 percent vs. 6.4 percent, according to a recent Georgetown University study.

Even for computer science majors, the jobless rate for recent grads nears 9 percent. (Read more in USA Today .) Protecting Detroit’s Artwork Is a Job for Detroit By now, everybody knows that the city of Detroit has finally filed for bankruptcy—and everybody in the art world knows that its museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, is in deep trouble. Here’s why: Detroit owes roughly $18 billion that it doesn’t have. The sixty-thousand-plus works of art in the permanent collection are owned by the city, not the museum (as is normally the case). According to the Detroit Free Press, the thirty-eight most important pieces have a market value of about $2.5 billion. What next? (Read more in the Wall Street Journal .) Only the Artists Can Save the Arts Critics How do you put a price on thought? How do you price an opinion? How do you even price the creative thought that the opinion was formed on? How do you do this in a culture—I think that’s the right word—where people are used not only to getting opinion for nothing, but expect good information for nothing as well?

(Read more in the Guardian .) Caveat Emptor: An Art Exhibit Made Entirely of Forgeries Confiscated by the FBI Upon entering Caveat Emptor you will likely recognize the exhibition’s work with confidence. Iconic pieces made famous by art legends such as Chagall, Warhol, Gauguin, and de Kooning adorn the walls, and yet, you probably haven’t heard of a single artist showing. That’s right, Caveat Emptor, which translates to “let the buyer beware,” is composed entirely of forgeries that have been confiscated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Read more in the Huffington Post .) The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Midcentury Books Vanish Last year I wrote about research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: there were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why?

Copyright protections—which cover titles published in 1923 and after—had squashed the market for books from the mid-twentieth century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public. (Read more in the Atlantic .) Did You Hear That? It Was Art Nothing? Listen again. Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall. And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. (Read more in the New York Times .) What Happened on August 10th This Day in History Space 1990 Space Magellan Space Craft Arrives At The Planet Venus 10th Aug. 1990 : The Magellan spacecraft begins it's orbit of the planet Venus after a 15-month journey from Earth.

The space craft spent the next four years mapping Venus, producing a detailed map of 99% of the planet. Find More What happened in 1990 UK 1897 England Automobile Club of Great Britain 10th Aug. 1897 : The first ever Auto Club is formed as the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland, later known as the ( RAC )Royal Automobile Club U.S. 1903 U.S.A. Master Forger 10th August 1903 : Charles Becker, master forger, referred to as “the Dutchman” will be released from San Quentin prison. Becker was sentenced to seven years for counterfeiting $22,000. Apparently, he was a model prisoner who did artwork in prison. Becker is considered to be the most masterful criminal in forty years. U.S. 1921 U.S.A. Franklin D. Roosevelt Polio Wednesday, 10th Aug. 1921 : While staying on holiday at his summer home on the Canadian island of Campobello, Franklin D.

Roosevelt at 39 years old suffers from the first signs of Polio ( paralytic poliomyelitis ) during the next 7 days the paralysis spreads over the rest of his body. This was unusual even for the time because most cases of Polio were found in children, and some believe that it was wrongly diagnosed, but the future president did believe it was Polio and in later life set up "The March Of Dimes Foundation" to search for a cure for the disease. It would be 30 years before a vaccine was developed that would help irradicate the disease . U.S. 1921 U.S.A. Bootleggers 10th Aug. 1921 : During prohibition a large ring of bootleggers was discovered in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. The bootleggers hid their illegal operations under the guise of being a “medicinal manufacturers” company. Another large ring of criminals was discovered in Ohio and Illinois. This bootlegging organization hid their illicit activities under the cover of being a flavouring extract company. U.S. 1936 U.S.A. Lincoln Steffens 10th Aug.

1936 : Seventy year old famous journalist Lincoln Steffens died in California of a heart ailment. He started his career in 1902 as editor of McClure’s magazine. President Theodore Roosevelt described Steffen’s style of writing as “muck raking”. However, Steffen tackled subjects like social injustice and corruption in public and private places. India 1942 India Rioting Follows Arrest Of Ghandi 10th Aug. 1942 : In India rioting and strikes occurred in Bombay and Delhi over the arrest of Mohandas K. Ghandi who advocated non-violent protests. Japan encouraged Indians to fight for their liberty from Britain and reported that they were standing on the India-Burma border ready to help liberate India. Japan 1945 Japan Surrender Terms 10th Aug. 1945 : Following the Atomic bombs Japan announced its willingness to surrender to Allies provided that the status of their Emperor Hirohito remains unchanged. U.S. 1954 U.S.A. St. Lawrence Seaway 10th August 1954 : Construction on the St. Lawrence Seaway began at Massena, New York. U.S.

1957 U.S.A. “protective milk” 10th Aug. 1957 : Dr. W.E. Peterson feels confident that the invention of “protective milk” can cure a variety of human illnesses such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, rheumatic fever, and even the common cold. The doctor has been doing experiments by injecting bacteria into cow’s udders to produce immunity in those who consume the milk. However, it has not yet been tried out on large numbers of people. France 1969 France Franc Devalued By 12 1/2% 10th Aug. 1969 : France has devalued its currency, the franc, by 12 1/2 %. This has produced depression in the country, but elation among tourists. Labor officials and the opposition have criticized President Charles de Gaulle’s financial policies for bringing France to this state. U.S. 1974 U.S.A. Gerald Ford 10th Aug. : In the wake of scandal, Richard Nixon’s resignation was accepted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford stepped into the oval office. Ford promised a government with honesty, and transparency.

U.S. 1977 U.S.A. Son Of Sam Arrested 10th Aug. 1977 : The " Son Of Sam " Serial killer David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker, was arrested after admitting that he was Son of Sam, the New York City serial killer. Lebanon 1986 Lebanon Terry Anderson 10th Aug. 1986 : In Beirut, Lebanon one of the hostages, Terry Anderson aged 38, was reported to be ill and in bed. Anderson was an American journalist with The Associated Press. He was taken prisoner on March 16th , 1985. White House officials could not confirm the report of his illness. Russia 1999 Russia Vladamir Putin 10th August 1999 : Vladamir Putin was newly installed as acting prime minister in Russia. However, he was quickly pressed into service by Boris Yelsin to help suppress Islamic fundamentalists in the south of Russia. Putin was a former KGB officer. Yelsin has reshuffled the cabinet over four times in less than a year and a half, which has raised concerns about his fitness to lead. U.S.

2002 U.S.A. Concerns Over Corporate Corruption 10th Aug. 2002 : Stock market losses, corporate corruption, and a sagging economy have hit senior citizens hard and have become an election issue. After retiring a couple of years ago Michael Dalal, a lawyer and businessman, lost half of his savings and had to go back to work. Seniors accounted for 14% of the vote in 2000 . The AARP (The Association of Retired People) is keeping an eye on pensions and corporate fraud prevention. UK 2003 UK Heatwave First Time Over 100 Degrees Fahrenheit 10th Aug. 2003 : The United Kingdom records its first ever temperature over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. At Brogdale in Kent a temperature of 101.3F was recorded the highest ever recorded temperature in the country since records began in 1875 . Throughout August the intense heat wave scorched Europe, claiming more than 35,000 lives. UK 2006 UK Terrorist Plot Foiled 10th Aug.

2006 : British police have announced the arrest of 24 suspects on suspicion of a terrorist plot to blow up 10 aircraft bound for US Airports. The terrorists had planned to blow up the aircraft with liquid explosives ( acetone peroxide (TATP) or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD) ). which would be in Lucozade or similar other innocuous bottles carried in hand luggage. Many of those arrested are British-born Muslims, some of Pakistani descent with possible links to the militant Islamic organization al-Qaeda. Space 2007 Space Damage Spotted On Space Shuttle Endeavour 10th Aug. 2007 : While docking with the International Space Station (ISS) damage has been spotted believed to have been caused during takeoff . The damage is 9 pieces of foam which have broken away. The damage is a major concern for Nasa since the Columbia disaster in 2003 which was caused through a similar problem and not repaired prior to re-entry.

Over the next 7 days astronauts will be sent out on space walks to first inspect the damage and send pictures back to NASA and then if needed to patch up the damage with filler of a metal shield to protect the area for re-entry. The Space shuttle has been sent to the International Space Station to replace one of the four gyroscopes which help control the orbiting outpost's orientation in space. 2007 Canada Announced Two military facilities Arctic 10th Aug. 2007 : Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced plans for the construction of two military facilities to be built in the Northern territory of the Arctic. These announcements came in the midst of heightened territorial claims by countries such as Denmark and Russia. 2008 U.S.A. Isaac Hayes Dies 10th Aug. 2008 : American music legend Isaac Hayes died of a stroke on this day at the age of 65. Hayes was known as a popular artist from the 1970's who contributed to the development of the hip-hop and R&B genres. He was also known for voicing the character of Chef in the popular cartoon comedy South Park. 2009 Sweden Greenpeace 10th Aug.

2008 : The environmental group Greenpeace began dropping large boulders of the coasts of Denmark and Sweden. The group did this as a way to prevent bottom-trawling fishing boats from damaging the environment and over-fishing the area. The group did this despite protests from the European Union who stated that they were already going to address the problem. 2009 Slovakia Mine Explosion 10th Aug. 2008 : An explosion in a coal mine in Handlova, Slovakia killed twenty workers and injured nine. The explosion occurred after a large build-up of gases ignited as the miners fought off a fire in the mine. UK 2011 UK Rioting 10th Aug. 2011 : Rioting has continued for a fourth night in Cities in Britain with reports of looting, arson and violence in Manchester. Birmingham, Liverpool and Nottingham Italy 2013 Italy Tomb Opened in Florence 10th August, 2013 : A tomb was opened in the city of Florence in Italy by scientists hoping to find the mysterious model for Leonardo da Vinci's famous Mona Lisa painting. They opened the family tomb of Lisa Gherardini who was thought to be the possible model.

The scientists hoped they would be able to identify her from DNA samples and then reconstruct her face from the skull. The Hunt for Mona Lisa's Bones Is A Publicity Stunt, Not Science The Hunt for Mona Lisa's Bones Is A Publicity Stunt, Not Science {{article.article.images.featured.caption}} Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Full Bio The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Loading ... This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe (AP Photo/Michele Barbero) Every summer since 2011, a report has come out that a team of Italian archaeologists is closer to finding the tomb and the bones of Lisa Gherardini, the woman who many art historians believe sat for Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. And every summer, the archaeologists come up empty handed, with a few scattered bones and radically revised plans for how they will salvage their quest to prove Gherardini was the Mona Lisa. But does it really matter if Gherardini is positively identified? Is it worth expending significant time and money on this attempt?

Timeline of Archaeological Discoveries 2011 In 2011, this quest first made news when Silvano Vinceti -- Italy's self-proclaimed art history super-sleuth -- decided to dig up the remains of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo. Gherardini's death certificate, discovered in 2007, suggests she was buried in a crypt under the floor at St. Ursula's convent in Florence. In April 2011, Vinceti announced his intention to find the long-forgotten tombs under the convent, excavate them, isolate any bones that match the age and sex of Gherardini, confirm this through DNA analysis, piece together the skull fragments, complete a facial reconstruction, and determine once and for all that Lisa Gherardini was indeed the Mona Lisa. Seemingly a tall order and a convoluted process, but on May 11, 2011, the archaeological team started digging. A day or two later, the team announced they had found a staircase leading to the crypt as well as two tombs and a brick vault. And on May 20, they announced the finding of a female-sized skull.

Photos were published of the damaged skull which in the end did not turn out to be those of Gherardini. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, files) The rapid, staccato pace at which Silvano Vinceti and his team began releasing information to the media in 2011 showcases his ability to harness public interest in his theory about the woman behind the famous Mona Lisa painting. Vinceti himself, though, is quite a controversial figure. In June 2010, he claimed to have found the remains of Caravaggio , a claim that was quickly disputed . He claimed in January to have found the symbols S, L, and 72 in Mona Lisa’s eyes , but art historians called his evidence unsubstantial. In February, Vinceti claimed a male model may have posed for the Mona Lisa, a theory that a Da Vinci expert called “groundless.” On the other hand, some news media have portrayed Vinceti as “ a modern-day Indiana Jones investigator ” and “ art’s self-styled super-sleuth .” These reports tend to characterize him as a researcher on a tenacious quest for the truth.

The Wall Street Journal, however, has noted that Vinceti is neither a trained historian nor a scientist – he is a TV host and producer – and that his “colleagues” in Italian art history note his “ wicked use of the mass media ” to distract the public from serious historical inquiry. 2012 The search for the rest of Gherardini’s skeleton was on hold until Italian archaeologists announced the discovery of additional bones on July 18, 2012. Like the cranium, the postcranial bones don't seem to be in great shape, although that doesn't necessarily mean osteological analysis is out of the question. As in 2011, Vinceti's plan in 2012 was also to DNA match the bones to Gherardini's descendants to prove they belonged to her rather than to Maria del Riccio, another noblewoman whose remains were also interred at Sant'Orsola, and then to commission a facial reconstruction.

(AP Photo/Michele Barbero) 2013 Fast forward to 2013, when Vinceti told the news media in August that they were carrying out carbon-14 dating of three skeletons to try to identify which one may have belonged to Gherardini and therefore which should be subjected to DNA testing. And they were still hoping that facial reconstruction could somehow provide a link to the Mona Lisa itself. But facial reconstruction is not a precise science . It cannot, for example, be entered into court as forensic testimony because it does not meet scientific reproducibility guidelines in U.S courts. Assuming the researchers could superimpose the Mona Lisa over an x-ray of Gherardini's broken skull, this method will reveal only what Vinceti wants it to reveal. 2014 In 2014, more news came out of Florence that DNA samples would be extracted in collaboration with a laboratory at the University of Bologna under the direction of Giorgio Gruppioni as well as other scientists. The samples to be tested were the ones whose carbon-14 dates matched up with the date of death of Lisa Gherardini in 1542.

2015 Given the paucity of information released each year since 2011, it is no surprise that this summer's announcement was met with little media fanfare. Vinceti is finally admitting that the bone remains are so fragmentary that they may never be able to extract DNA, much less match it to one of Gherardini's living descendants. Speaking to Reuters, Giorgio Gruppioni agrees that it is not likely they have found Mona Lisa. "What we hope is sophisticated techniques will eventually allow us to extract and analyze and compare the DNA to be able to ascertain that genetically these are the remains of Lisa Gherardini," he told Reuters . (FABIO MUZZI/AFP/Getty Images) Why should we care if this hunt for Gherardini is a waste of time? By all accounts, Gherardini lived a quiet, ordinary life, and it's unfortunate that she cannot have a quiet, ordinary death. I can't think of any scientific reason to pour so much money and effort into finding the skeleton of a woman who posed for a (famous, admittedly) painting.

With other famous people like Farinelli (see: Castration Affected Skeleton of Famous Opera Singer Farinelli ), whose bodily changes can help archaeologists identify other eunuchs in the archaeological record, or the discovery of the body of Richard III, which helps fill in some historical gaps around his death, there are arguably legitimate research questions about their lives and bodies. But facial reconstruction of Lisa Gherardini will not give us any information about her life or the painting she posed for. Osteological analysis may reveal some insight into her diet, her health, or her behavior, but these data will be difficult to contexualize because of the lack of analysis of other skeletons from the same time period and location. Exhuming Lisa Gherardini and studying her bones will sate our need for osteo-biographies of famous people of the past. And it will almost certainly bring more tourist dollars to Florence, especially if the skeleton goes on display. But it won't contribute anything substantial to forensics, archaeology, or art history. Vinceti’s quest to dig up the “real” Mona Lisa is not grounded in scientific research methodology.

The continued coverage of this needle-in-a-haystack search threatens to signal to the public that archaeologists are frivolous with their time, energy, and research money. Silvano Vinceti may have stumbled upon the grave of Lisa Gherardini, who may have been painted as the Mona Lisa. But attempting to wrangle a few bits of bone into an archaeo-forensic assessment of a particular person – an assessment that has already been determined by Vinceti – is almost certainly a ploy to drum up interest in Vinceti’s generally harebrained theories rather than a serious inquiry into the past.

Question: In August 2013, scientists in Florence, Italy opened a tomb in order to extract DNA, hoping to identify the model for which painting?
Answer: Mona Lisa