$1350 cornflake

Two sisters from Virginia sold their Illinois-shaped cornflake on eBay Friday night for $1,350. . .

The winner of the auction, which lasted more than a week, is the owner of a trivia Web site who wants to add the cornflake to a traveling museum.

This isn't the first cornflake that Kerr has tried to buy. He said he purchased a flake billed as the world's largest, but that by the time it was delivered it had crumbled into three pieces.

Full story here.

Bargain Palma

The Times of London reports on a little Palma Giovane recently bought at a Windsor (UK) antique shop for £350. One happy buyer; one very unhappy seller. In the US, one could bet on lawyers getting involved . . . .

Tudor quill pen

Yet another entry in the "excavating within the museum" category:

A Tudor quill pen thought to have been dropped through the floorboards of Whitehall Palace by some overworked, underpaid civil servant of the day has been discovered, to the astonishment of archaeologists. . .

It was among some 4,000 cardboard boxes in the archives of the Museum of London. They are full of material excavated from the historic palace but never studied or catalogued. The excavation was in the 1960s, but the archaeologists from the Ministry of Works then never got around to studying their finds.

From the Times of London.

Robbing a ships' graveyard

A dinosaurs' graveyard of Britain's maritime past emerges eerily from a mile and a half of bank along the River Severn.

Bleached blond ribs of once proud schooners, lighters, barges and Severn trows poke from the silt, still stained with pitch and the carmine of rusting iron nails. Above them loom abandoned concrete grain barges built during wartime when steel was in short supply.

The Purton hulks have become a magnet for naval historians, marine archaeologists and photographers enraptured by the weatherworn timbers and the tales they hold. But this unique repository of marine history is disappearing quickly, prompting the launch of a campaign to protect it.

The main problem is not the tidal waters of the Severn that take their toll at every high tide but human scavengers who, for more than 100 years, have been picking over the hulks for timber or valuable metals.

More than 80 vessels, abandoned over a 50-year period. See it while you still can. From the Times of London.

Lost and found

Hanging on the wall of an upper floor in Jerusalem's Israel Museum is a fine early 20th century painting of a wintry church scene by the French artist Maurice Utrillo. On its own it is an artwork more than worthy of a new exhibition, but what makes this piece and the many others on display so compelling are the dark stories of their provenance and the long and often fruitless search for the original Jewish owners of thousands of works of art confiscated at the height of the second world war. . .

The Utrillo is one of 53 such paintings in the Israel Museum's latest exhibition, Looking for Owners. Alongside it is a parallel exhibition, Orphaned Art, of looted works and Judaica which all lack clear ownership history and are now held at the museum.

From the Guardian. NY Times slideshow here.

Round and round it goes

The Islamists threaten bloody murder over improper depictions of the Prophet. A Muslim artist is accused of painting improper depictions of Hindu divinities:

The New York office of the art auction house, Christie's, has rejected demands to withdraw the work of controversial Indian artist, MF Husain.

In a letter sent to Christie's, the Indian American Intellectual Forum threatened to hold demonstrations unless the auction is dropped.

Mr Husain is one of India's best known artists.

In 2006 he publicly apologised for a painting in which he depicted the country as a nude goddess.

He promised to withdraw the controversial painting from a charity auction after Hindu nationalist groups accused him of hurting their religious sentiments.

They have accused him of painting Hindu gods and goddesses in a ''derogatory and vulgar'' form.

Despite the protests, the painting at Christie's sold:

A painting by one of India's best-known artists, Maqbool Fida Husain, has sold for a record $1.6m at an auction in the American city of New York.

The art work, titled "Ganga-Yamuna", was sold by auction house Christie's. It was painted in 1971.

Bruce Ferrini bankruptcy auction

An auction to help pay down an art and antiquities dealers' $5 million debt doesn't include the most controversial and valuable items in his collection of mostly religious artifacts.

The auction of 153 items seized from Bruce Ferrini include a 2,800-year-old strip of linen mummy wrap, inscribed with text from the Book of the Dead, and a Babylonian pottery vessel that is 3,800 years old.

Scott Haley, the lawyer charged with raising money to pay Ferrini's debts, arranged the auction of the items, some that go back hundreds of years B.C.

The items were taken from Ferrini in 2005. Despite their quality, many mainstream auction houses shied from handling the auction, which wraps up Wednesday. Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries is handling the sale with the items on view at Arte Primitivo Gallery in New York City.

As the article at Ohio.com notes, the pieces most disputed are not being put up for sale, most notably the fragments of the Gospel of Judas.

Son of Ramesses II found

An Egyptian mummy kept on display in a provincial museum for nearly 80 years has been identified as a son of the powerful pharaoh Ramesses II.

The 3,000-year-old relic was thought to have been a female temple dancer, but a hospital CT scan showed features so reminiscent of the Egyptian royal family that experts are 90 per cent sure it is one of the 110 children Ramesses is thought to have fathered.

Busy fellow. From the Telegraph.

Cleaning Donatello's David

Laser technology has revealed that Donatello's David, one of the most important statues of the Italian Renaissance, was once decorated with gold leaf. . .

The work has been opened to the public, who can watch the restorers using a medical-grade laser to clean off the residue that has built up on the statue. . .

The restorers have been using lasers that are customised to shoot a "longer pulse" than the ones used by surgeons. . .

The gold had been buried under a thick layer of wax that was applied to the statue in the 18th century. Ms Nicolai said that when David was kept at the Uffizi Gallery he was covered in a "mixture of wax, oils and pigment".

The Uffizi wanted to darken the statue's colour so it would match the other sculptures in its collection.

From the Telegraph.

Last French WW1 veteran laid to rest

France has given full military honours to its last World War I veteran, Lazare Ponticelli, who died on Wednesday at the age of 110.

President Nicolas Sarkozy led a ceremony in Paris to commemorate him, and eight million other Frenchmen who fought in the conflict. . .

Mr Ponticelli, originally Italian, had lied about his age in order to join the French Foreign Legion in 1914, aged 16.

From the BBC, with more here:

There are a handful of surviving WWI veterans from other countries, including British pilot Henry Allingham and Austro-Hungarian artillery man Franz Kunstler. . .

The last of Germany's veterans from the war . . . died in January.

Buried with an alepot

A 4,000-year-old skeleton has been unearthed by experts working on building Britain's biggest ever greenhouse - clutching a pint of beer.

The Bronze Age man's body was dug up by archaeologists who were called in after a team of builders working on the construction of the giant Thanet Earth project in Monkton, Kent, uncovered the skeleton last week.

From the Daily Mail.

Sydney search finds Kormoran

An Australian team searching for a lost World War II cruiser have located the wreck of the German merchant raider that sank it. . .

The Sydney was sailing back to Australia from Sumatra on 19 November 1941 when the Kormoran - disguised as a Dutch merchant vessel - launched its attack.

Both ships sank as a result of the battle.

All 645 of those on board the Sydney were lost, but 317 of the Kormoran's 397-strong crew managed to escape by rowing to the Australian coast, where they became prisoners-of-war.

The loss of the Sydney was described by Australian Navy chief Vice-Adm Russ Shalders as "Australia's major maritime mystery".

From the BBC.

Collecting Harry Potter

There's a bunch of stuff coming up at Christie's on Wednesday; read about it in the Telegraph.