For 50 years the crossing of Florence Cathedral stood open to the sky until Filippo Brunelleschi’s herringbone brickwork and sandstone chains let the dome build itself, course by course, from 1420 to 1436.
The Genoa show that gave poor materials a movement
Germano Celant’s 1967 essay named a loose group of Italian artists working with rope, coal and live horses. Pistoletto’s rag Venus, burned in Naples in 2023, shows how the idea still operates today.
Two hundred years on, Turin’s Egyptian museum rebuilds itself
The world’s oldest museum devoted to ancient Egypt marked its 2024 bicentenary with a new OMA-designed Gallery of the Kings, built around Bernardino Drovetti’s 1824 collection and Ernesto Schiaparelli’s intact 1906 tomb find.
A euro coin buys ninety seconds of Caravaggio’s light
Caravaggio’s three Saint Matthew canvases, painted 1599–1602 for a French cardinal’s stalled bequest, still hang in San Luigi dei Francesi, lit today by a coin-operated box. The rejected first altarpiece was destroyed in Berlin in 1945.