A rare 19th century glider has been restored and will go on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The glider was made in 1896 by German aviator Otto Lilienthal, the first man to successfully make consistent, repeated, thoroughly documented and witnessed flights. He was dubbed “The Flying Man” and 1891, the year when his flights began, is considered the dawn of human heavier-than-air flight.

He literally wrote the book on wing aerodynamics, observing the flight of birds for translation to flying machines. One of his glider models, the Lilienthal Normalsegelapparat (“Normal soaring apparatus” would make a pretty great band name), was the first aircraft in series production. His manufacturing company, Maschinenfabrik Otto Lilienthal, was the first airplane production company in the world.

Unfortunately Otto Lilienthal would pay for his pioneering vision with his life, dying on August 9th, 1896, when his glider stalled and he plunged 50 feet to the ground. He broke his neck in the fall and died in the hospital the next day. His last words were “Sacrifices must be made.”

There were 10 documented Lilienthal Normalsegelapparat examples sold between 1893 and 1896. The only American buyer was newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst bought his glider in late April 1896. Lilienthal’s daring flights had generated a great deal of public interest and Hearst staged flight tests for public spectacle and to increase the circulation of the New York Journal. The dream lasted a few days only. On May 3rd, the glider, piloted by Frank Ver Beck, an illustrator known for his comedic drawings of animals, crashed. Ver Beck was unharmed, but the glider sustained some broken ribs on the right wing.

The Hearst glider was put in mothballs until it was acquired by John Brisben Walker, editor of Cosmopolitan. He displayed it once in 1905 at the debut event of the Aero Club of America before donating it to the Smithsonian in 1906. Restoration of the fragile winged machine began in November 2019 and it took experts 18 months to restore it not to its pristine condition, but to the broken-rib condition it was in right after the crash.

According to Smithsonian records, an employee rebuilt the Lilienthal glider in 1919. But for this conservation treatment, curators determined that the horizontal stabilizer had been lost after the crash, and its 1919 copy was inaccurate and incorrectly positioned. The original vertical fin was too damaged to be reattached, so it was preserved and placed in storage.

But the broken ribs from the crash, which are part of the glider’s history and identity, says [chief conservator Malcolm] Collum, were preserved. “As a rare and special artifact, we consider events like that part of its operational history,” he says. “Just like a fighter plane that comes back… and has combat damage like bullet holes…we consider that to be sacred.” During previous restoration efforts, Collum says, “a lot of historical manufacturing details were just skimmed over.”

Smithsonian conservators worked with colleagues at the Otto Lilienthal Museum and the Deutsches Museum in Germany searching for details in the historical record. “What really differentiates this project from previous restoration work: Every time it was restored in the past, they were using … the wrong information, and not studying the artifact itself,” Collum says. “In this process, we’ve actually done the technical analysis, done the archival research, and collaborated with colleagues in Germany to bring out as many original historical details as possible.”

In some places where the wood needed support, they used glue to reinforce it. They did make a discovery. They had not realized the glider had an impact bar, so they added one after finding the original mounting hardware. And they added a new plain-weave cotton fabric, as the original was long gone. And the tail, which had been poorly fabricated in a 1967 restoration, was replaced with historically accurate components made with bamboo and willow.

The Smithsonian’s restored Lilienthal glider will go on display in Early Flight, an exhibition exploring the first decade of the airplane era, which opens this fall.

Villa Aurora, the 16th century mansion in one of Rome’s most expensive neighborhoods that boasts Caravaggio’s only known ceiling painting has failed to sell at auction for the second time.

The villa was listed for €471 million when it was first put up for auction in January, an astronomical sum based on the valuation of art experts. The Caravaggio alone could easily run a hundred million plus even if it weren’t attached to a whole villa, so the exorbitant price tag didn’t seem incongruous. There were no takers, however, not even lowball opening bids. Total radio silence.

A second auction was scheduled for Thursday, April 7th, and this time the price would drop 20% to €377 million. Even at a discount, the Villa Aurora failed to attract a single bid, so the quarrelling heirs of the late Prince Nicolò Boncompagni Ludovisi are going to have to take it to the auction mattresses again on June 30th when the villa will be offered at auction for another 20% drop in price to €301 million. If there are STILL no takers at that point, the widow Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi and the prince’s three sons from a previous marriage will have to agree to ANOTHER price drop.

The problem is that the American-born princess does not want to sell. Prince Nicolò’s will granted her lifetime rights to live on the property as long as she wanted to, and should she choose not to, Villa Aurora was to be sold and the proceeds divided between his wife and sons. The Boncompagni Ludovisi sons contested the will, disputing her lifetime right of occupancy, and a court decision forced the sale.

So the four parties who are responsible for negotiating a new price if June’s auction fails to attract bidders are not exactly on the same page here. Should they be unable to come up with a lower figure for the fourth bite at the apple, the judge will step in and decide the price.

According to Beniamino Milioto, the princess’s lawyer, interested parties will have to put down a 10% deposit to qualify to bid, plus proof of enough assets to close the sale and complete a restoration plan said to cost at least €10m.

Milioto said that while there had been multiple informal expressions of interest, including from Microsoft’s Bill Gates, nobody had completed the process of qualifying to bid for either round.

The villa and its property are under the protection of Italy’s ministry of culture, meaning that when a qualifying bid is filed, the Italian state will have a chance to match the price and turn the villa into a cultural site. A petition calling for this to happen has attracted more than 35,000 signatures, a level that requires the cash-strapped Italian government to consider the acquisition. But there is no indication a state purchase is in the works.

Whoever acquires the 40-room villa will become owner of a vast collection of art that goes beyond Caravaggio’s 2.75-metre fresco of the gods Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. Its gardens include a sculpture by Michelangelo, and in the villa are other ceilings featuring frescoes by the baroque master Guercino and a spiral staircase created by the 16th- and 17th-century architect Carlo Maderno, best known for designing the facade of St Peter’s Basilica.

The villa also includes a telescope given to the Ludovisi family by Galileo and a door that was once part of an ancient Venetian warship.

BRB. Off to buy a Powerball ticket.

Renovations at the Saltworks Castle in Wieliczka, southern Poland, have revealed surviving sections of the original 17th century polychrome decorative painting on the walls of five rooms. The headquarters of the UNESCO World Heritage Wieliczka Salt Mine for 700 years, the Castle is now home to the Krakow Saltworks Museum dedicated to the history of salt and of the mine. The museum has been undergoing a refurbishment of previously unused rooms to expand the castle’s exhibition facilities. The paintings were discovered when 300 years of plaster and paint covering them were removed.

The polychrome paintings include floral and plant motifs — bouquets in vases, leafy wreaths — arabesque decorations and the coat of arms of the Vasa family.  One of the rooms has a particularly spectacular array of trompe l’oeil architectural elements in classicist style like columns, arches and landscapes in the distance between them.

They were found on the first floor of the eastern part of the castle which has rooms dating back to the 16th century. The directors of the salt mine lived there in the 18th and 19th centuries, but there were no records describing the wall decoration, so the discovery of a large number of paintings with well-preserved color came as a shock to restorers.

The plan to use the rooms as temporary and permanent exhibition space will now have to find a way to showcase the treasures they’ve found on the very walls.

“The preserved layers, from different periods, intertwine; in some places they are preserved only in small fragments, and in some – in large ones “- emphasized the conservator. “We plan to expose all layers to show them as the history of this object. If such possibilities arise and such a decision is made, we can possibly remove some of the outer layers – this is called a transfer, transfer to a new substrate – and display them in a different part of the castle , wherever the available exhibition space will allow it “- explained Chojkowski.

The “delamination” method allows the reconstruction of a larger area of ​​earlier polychromes. “The fact that one of them is younger does not mean that it has a lower value, because it can be much more interesting. For us, partial removal or transfer of layers to a new substrate is so important that there are probably even earlier plasters here. now it is difficult to say whether there is also any layer of polychrome there “- said the conservator.