Mark Podwal (American, b. 1945)
Pomegranates with Torah Shields, 2008
Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on paper
7 3/4 x 12 1/8 in. (19.7 x 30.8 cm)
© Mark Podwal, 2008, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York
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This beloved painter's work, including all of his Saturday Evening Post covers, is currently on an extensive U.S. tour.

December typically brings a blizzard of social gatherings leading into the holidays: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, New Year's Eve, Festivus and, of course, birthdays. Some famous artists who were born in December are listed here. Have fun exploring!
Jonathan Jones over at the Guardian is now convinced that Caravaggio's Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence will never again be seen. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio executed the painting in 1609 shortly before his untimely death. It was the last work he finished during his nine months in Sicily, and it had hung in the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo for 360 years until being cut from its frame and stolen in October of 1969.
Last year Jones pieced together evidence from the 1996 court testimony of a pentito (Mafia insider-turned-informant) that seemed to conclude Nativity had been irreparably damaged while being stolen. And then, last week, separate (but not contradictory) testimony from another pentito claimed that the painting was eaten by rats and pigs in the farm outbuilding in which it had been hidden. Those few scraps that remained were burned sometime in the 1980s. I'm inclined to agree with Jones, mourn and thank the technology gods that we have reproductions, at least. Also? One wonders, yet again, why low-level flunkies with ham hands and knives always seem to be the stooges sent to manglesteal priceless canvases.
On a lighter (?) note, there is also word of a potential Caravaggio discovery. Reuters reports that a team of Italian anthropologists are on the hunt for a piece of the artist's skeletal remains in a mass crypt in Porto Ercole, Tuscany. Why? I'm not exactly sure, but suppose we're all somewhat morbidly curious to know if Caravaggio died of malaria, an STD, a sword wound or poison. (Although, personally, I'm not curious enough to want to sift through that which amounts to a big box full of bones looking for under-40 male specimens.)
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Marvelously, especially seeing as all of the eyewitnesses have been dead for centuries and only 20% of the original mural survives, an outfit known as Leonardo3 has "digitally reconstructed" Leonardo's Last Supper by stitching together high-resolution imagery and filling in color pixels. I'm guessing this worked in much the same way as using the "eyedropper" tool in Photoshop? The results. (Note the startlingly vivid, cookie-cutter perfect coloring, the re-emergence of the patterned wall hangings, the pristine tablecloth and Jesus' getting His feet back.)
Discovery News has all of the details here, along with the supremely annoying lazy-journalism habit of referring to Leonardo as "Da Vinci."
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