“I saw water dripping from the painting for an hour” after the fire at an adjacent construction site was put out late on Sunday, the head of Venice’s museum agency Vittorio Sgarbi told AFP, adding that he rushed to the scene after seeing the fire while dining at a nearby restaurant.

Workers have erected scaffolding to inspect the damaged “David and Goliath” along with two other Titians that look down from the ceiling of Santa Maria della Salute’s vestry.

“The painting might have experienced some alteration, but nothing that can’t be restored,” said Sgarbi, a well-known art critic.

David and Goliath was restored 20 years ago. It’s that recent restoration work that is most likely to have been affected by the water. Restorers nowadays use “reversible” colors to ensure that they don’t fall into the trap of past restorations that ended up materially altering the original canvas. That makes them easy to remove in case they’ve made a mistake without needing to use any harsh solvents that might damage the original brushstrokes. That also makes them more susceptible to external elements like, oh, say, gallons of water from firefighter hoses, but by design they’re easy to repair so that’s why Sgarbi doesn’t sound too upset.

There are several other Titian paintings in the vestry of the basilica (8 tondi of the Doctors of the Church and the Evangelists) which may have been damaged when the sprinkler system went off in response to the fire next door. Any damage that may have occurred isn’t immediately obvious. They will all be carefully examined and repaired as necessary.

Santa Maria della Salute (Saint Mary of Health) was built in 1631 as a votive offering to the Virgin Mary, considered the protector of the Venetian Republic, to end the devastating plague of 1630.

“Everybody who comes to the museum is encouraged to lift the gold bar and to have a firsthand experience with history,” said Melissa Kendrick, the museum’s executive director. “This is one of the most iconic and best-known objects in the museum.”

Somehow one of the thieves managed to break through the case, lift out the bar and walk casually out the door with the ingot in his pocket. The security footage (which you can see in this CNN video) doesn’t show how they broke through bulletproof plastic. I can’t detect a weapon or device of any kind. It looks like he just reaches in and pulls out the gold bar, but they had to bust up the case to do it.

The ingot was found in 1980 by famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher. He and his team were looking for the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha galleon, a treasure ship that left Havana in 1622 along with a fleet of 27 other ships crammed to the rafters with New World booty only to be felled by a hurricane. Instead he found the wreck of one of the other 7 ships from that treasure fleet which went down in the storm: the Santa Margarita.

The gold ingot was one of the more dramatic pieces Fisher recovered from the Santa Margarita. Not only is it a large and handsome, but it has a variety of unique markers including Roman numerals marking it as 16-karat gold, a symbol identifying its owner, and dots indicating the taxes paid on it to the Spanish crown.

Its estimated value is $550,000, but the weight of the gold alone is worth $75,000. The museum is offering a $10,000 reward for its return. Here’s hoping the bastards don’t just melt it down and smoke 70 grand worth of meth.

Archaeologists from the Museum of London also found the remains of the porcelain piggy banks (not actually shaped like piggies) which held the theater’s earnings until they were pooled together for division of the spoils among the company.

The broken, ceramic money boxes, which had to be smashed to give up their contents, have been traced to the playhouse’s accounts office. The earnings were the subject of dozens of lawsuits involving the actor and manager, James Burbage, and The Theatre’s other co-owner, John Brayne. [...]

Other playhouses were regarded by London authorities as “an offence to the godly” and a “hindrance to the Gospel”. The playhouses were well known for “unchaste matters, lascivious devices and other lewd and ungodly practices”. Theatre-goers were seen as “the worst sort” of “evil and disordered people” who skipped work “to mis-spend their time”.

Excavations at New Inn Yard, Shoreditch, are building up that picture. Archaeologists have unearthed scores of fragments of mid- to late 16th century wine and ale flagons and mugs – found in what was probably the playhouse’s bar area. Disorderly behaviour, doubtless often partly fuelled by alcohol – was one of the reasons the authorities disliked the establishment.

The rabble liked the establishment just fine, obviously, and no wonder. Historians believe The Theatre was where Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet premiered, and if not the first stage to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Love’s Labour’s Lost, it was among the first.

Interestingly, The Theater’s drunken audience may have in part been owing to the site’s previous use as a monastery. The remains of St John the Baptist Priory, a large and prosperous monastery founded in the 12th century then shut down during Henry VIII’s dissolution of monasteries in 1539, have been found along with the The Theater remains. Museum of London archaeologists suspect Burbage actually used the alehouse, re-purposing it as a tap house attached to the theater. Later imitators like The Globe and The Rose had in-house pubs, and we know the alehouse was still being used as such after the monastery was shut down, so it makes sense that The Theater might have taken advantage of the sweet location to start a trend.

The only remains of the theater’s structure that have been found thus far are an inner wall, a fragment of the outer wall, and the compacted gravel courtyard which is where the general audiences would have stood. The wooden superstructure never had a chance to survive intact. Burbage’s sons dismantled it in 1598 (without the property owner’s knowledge) and used the wood to the build The Globe theater where Shakespeare’s players moved. That ill-gotten timber burned down with the first Globe 14 years after its illicit recycling.

Conservators removed the cracked and yellowed varnish, but left a very thin layer so as to protect the top surface of the paint. The change in color is noticeable but not a huge night-and-day alteration. The colors are more saturated, and you can see a lot more detail in the dark areas.

By removing the varnish, restorers revealed not only fresh details but also were able to identify more areas that were likely painted by Leonardo’s hand than they expected. There’s another Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre that was made earlier, you see, between 1483-1486. That one was thought to be mostly the work of Leonardo himself, whereas the National Gallery version was painted considerably later (some time before 1508) and although it was attributed to the master, because of was considered to have been primarily painted by his assistants.

The conservation work and study of materials and techniques uncovered different parts of the painting reached different stages of completion – the angel’s hand was barely sketched while the heads of the main figures appear completely finished, the gallery says.

“In the past, gallery curators, like many scholars of Renaissance painting elsewhere, have explained the different levels of finish and resolution in the picture by arguing that Leonardo was helped by assistants,” the gallery said.

“It now seems possible that Leonardo painted all the picture himself, leaving some parts just sketched or yet to be completely resolved and others fully worked up.”

Considering that the original commission for the painting was made in 1483 (the commission papers are still extant), and that he finished the first version fairly quickly, it’s interesting that he kept working on the design for another 25 years. Especially since he never actually sold the first one to the people who commissioned it. It was supposed to be central panel of a carved altarpiece for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan, but Leonardo went in another direction and he decided to sell it privately for more money, probably to Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan.

The pieces are a charger platter from the 1660s painted with tulips, a bowl painted with a boy taunting a dog, and a bowl dated 1674 which commemorates the marriage of Mr. Nathaniel Townsend of the Leathersellers Company. They’re tin-glazed, a ceramic known today as Delftware even when made in Britain rather than in the famous Dutch ceramics center of Delft.

Roy Stephenson, Head of Archaeological Collections at the Museum of London, said the richly decorated bowls should be seen as rare pieces of fine art in their own right today.

“The thing about tin-glazed wear is every piece is unique because it is painted individually by hand,” he told Reuters.

“The analogy I use about 17th century Delftware is: if you were to try and acquire 17th century art today you would have to be a multi millionaire,” said Stephenson, adding that it was the most unusual group find he had seen in the last 20 years.

There are no signatures or artists’ marks, but the ceramics would have been seen as pieces of art for display on tables and mantelpieces, not as food vessels or utilitarian items.

The bowls were found in fragments during preparation for an upcoming rail extension. Archaeologists pieced them back together. There are still a few bits missing, but there’s more than enough left to make a handsome display in the “War, Plague and Fire” gallery of the Museum of London.