Stealing the “Mona Lisa” was especially stupefying, since it would be almost impossible to fence the most recognizable painting in the world. As thousands of people flocked to the Louvre to see the empty space where the famous portrait had hung, French detectives scrambled to find and arrest the thief or thieves. The author of the letter, Vincenzo Perugia, eventually produced the picture from the bottom of a trunk in his hotel room, and he was promptly arrested. Scotti combines her skills as historian and novelist to re-create this sensational crime, which has all the twists and turns of a mystery novel, except that it’s true.
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They do now, and they did in Renaissance Italy, when the sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio was creating his panel “Beheading of the Baptist,” for the silver altar in the Florence Baptistery, now in the Cathedral Museum in Florence. The style in which Leonardo drew every detail of the warrior resembled two of the figures in the altarpiece. Radke saw when he examined two of the figures — a youth with a salver (or round plate) and a turbaned officer carrying a baton — was a different level of detail, making them look far more three-dimensional than the rest. For so many in the art world Claes Oldenburg’s Happenings — quirky performance pieces that took place around the country in the early 1960s, including in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles and Chicago, in old storefronts, a shack, a university hall or outdoors — are fairly mythic occurrences, known primarily through scripts, photographs and legends. Iles began working on the show, which opens May 7, she went to meet with the 80-year-old artist in his SoHo studio specifically to discuss films shot at some of the Happenings, an aspect of his early work.
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When you’re a video game developer channeling the historical mojo of artist Leonardo da Vinci, master schemer Machiavelli and the financial wizards of the Medici clan, are you subtly saying your new game is going to be a masterpiece of stunning visuals, cunning fun and blockbuster sales? Assassin’s Creed II, due out this holiday season for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PCs, faces the formidable task of improving on one of the gems in the Montreal studio’s already impressive crown of titles, while also bringing to life a time period that many of us associate with dusty museums and dry lectures. Except Assassin’s Creed II won’t see the return of the first game’s anti-hero Altair, who sent nine souls to meet their maker against the backdrop of 12th-century Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus. This time, players will step into the boots of young Italian nobleman Ezio Auditore di Firenze, whose personal story of betrayal begins in 1476 and is woven into the series’ overarching plot of a centuries-spanning power struggle between the order of assassins and the mysterious Knights Templar. Many players praised the first game’s lush visuals, fluid animation and intuitive controls that allowed them to guide the fleet-footed, free-running Altair across rooftops with ease, doing battle with guards, shaking down sources for information and plotting the complex, white-knuckle assassinations of heavily guarded targets. With fans’ hopes for Assassin’s Creed II as sky-high as the Campanile di Giotto bell tower looming over the winding streets of Florence, the 300-plus Ubisoft employees toiling away on the sequel have a lot to live up to.
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