□ Thursday, 18 Aug 2011

And you think you knew the 'Mona Lisa'
This much is well established: On Aug. 21, 1911, an Italian house painter named Vincenzo Peruggia, who had briefly worked on a project at the Louvre, walked out of the Paris museum with the celebrated masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci. More...

Museums’ fine art of protecting masterpieces
Four-and-a-half months after she was charged with trying to tear a Gauguin painting from a wall in the National Gallery of Art — and just three weeks after she was released from St. Elizabeths Hospital — a Northern Virginia woman was arrested in a similar assault on a work by Matisse at the museum. More...