One of only three known examples of a finely chased bronze ostrich from the workshop of Renaissance master Giambologna will be sold auction next week. It was previously owned by writer, parliamentarian and avid collector Horace Walpole and has been owned by the same family since it was sold by his great-nephew along with the rest of his extraordinary collection of art and antiquities 180 years ago. The pre-sale estimate is £80,000-£120,000 ($110,000-$165,000).

Citing his impressionistically modelled bronze birds created for the grotto in the garden of the Medici Villa at Castello, near Florence, in 1567, historic scholarship has attributed the ostriches to Giambologna. Indeed, other bronze models of ostriches attributed to Giambologna include an example in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and in the Hermitage, St Petersburg. While these examples demonstrate that the ostrich was a popular subject during the period and was clearly part of Giambologna’s oeuvre, the Austrian and Russian examples lack the drama, potency and spontaneity of movement demonstrated by the three models previously discussed. Although some sources still attribute the models to Giambologna, in recent years the scholarship has begun to diverge, with some experts now attributing the work to Giambologna’s student, and heir to his studio, Pietro Tacca (1577-1640). This pivot is in part due to the stylistic similarity observed in Tacca’s delineation of the tails of his bronze horses to the dynamic and vivacious rendering of the ostriches’ plumage.

Horace Walpole, who was as avid a documenter as he was a collector, noted in his journal that he had bought it in Paris in 1765 or 1766. It joined the rest of his vast collection at Strawberry Hill, his Gothic Revival villa in Twickenham, London. In the exhaustive 1774 inventory of Strawberry Hill, the bronze ostrich is recorded as being placed in a window between a bronze Ibis and a bronze replica of the Laocoön Group, one of dozens of fine works of art and antiquities in the first-floor Gallery. It kept company with portraits by Rubens, Van Dyck and Lely, landscapes, seascapes, busts of Roman emperors and empresses, altars, urns, antique Japanese commodes, porcelains, coins and much, much more. Walpole described it is “an ostrich, very spirited.”

His great-nephew reused the description in the catalogue of the Great Sale of Strawberry Hill in April 1842. It was listed as “a fine antique bronze of an Ostrich, very spirited in effect, on a bronze scroll stand.” It was acquired by wealthy landowner John Dunn-Gardner and his descendants are the current owners.

The other two known examples of this striding ostrich are now in the collections of the Louvre and the Fitzwilliam Museum. The Louvre’s is the earliest recorded example, first documented in 1689, and it also the most active and dynamic and because of this experts believe it was the latest of the three. The Fitzwilliam’s is believed to be the earliest, as it has a less pronounced S-curved neck and less dramatic plumage. The example up for auction is midway between the two in dynamism and movement, so is thought to be the middle ostrich child.

Almost a decade after a comprehensive multidisciplinary program of conservation and restoration began, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, also known as the Ghent Altarpiece, has gone back on display at Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent in a new high-tech setting.

The double-sided 12-panel polyptych by Hubert and Jan van Eyck has been relocated from a small chapel near the entrance to the Sacrament chapel, one of the largest chapels in the cathedral and close to the location where the altarpiece was first installed. The space was enlarged to make way for a new bespoke display case and to aid in the flow of traffic when visitors can once again flock to see the Northern Renaissance’s greatest masterpiece.

The custom case cost more than $35 million. It is bulletproof, climate controlled and contains pneumatically controlled steel supports that allow the wings of the panels to be opened every morning and closed every evening so at different times visitors can see both the vividly colored front of the panels and the muted tones and grisailles on the reverse.

Experts from the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA, Brussels) discovered a great deal about the iconic masterpiece, removing centuries of discolored varnish, retouches and overpaint to reveal the original work by the van Eycks. From 2012 until its completion at the end of 2019, the program’s archival research, radiography, multispectral imaging and ground-breaking technical study cast new light on Van Eyck’s original vision for the polyptych. The Mystic Lamb, central figure of the composition, got a completely new face, or rather got his first, much more human-like face back.

The research, documentation and imaging data were integrated into a truly best-in-class website with high-resolution photographs of the Ghent Altarpiece. The website has been active for years, sharing the results of this seminal study of the altarpiece in granular, brushstroke-level detail. Most recently, the complete oeuvre of Jan van Eyck, his studio and followers has been added to the site, so its purview goes far beyond the altarpiece alone.

Visitors to Saint Bavo’s will first be directed to the crypt where art works and objects related to the altarpiece and the Van Eycks, including the grave of Hubert van Eyck, are exhibited. The experience is enhanced by Microsoft HoloLens, which unlike VR helmets allows users to see the space as it is while adding a digital layer of augmented reality. The headset tours will illuminate the history of the altarpiece, how it was created, the meaning of its dense allegories and portraits.

For now, pandemic measures restrict the number of visitors allowed into the crypt and the chapel — 350 tickets a day for the former, five people at a time for the latter.

A miniature portrait has been identified as a rare surviving image of King Henry III of France. Just over two inches tall, the portrait was billed as an image of Sir Walter Raleigh when it was sold sight unseen in the English countryside during lockdown last year. Conservators at Philip Mould & Co, a London art gallery that specializes in historical portraiture, identified the subject as Henry III.

When the frame was removed, experts found another notable name on the back of the portrait: Jean Decourt, in a contemporary annotation, perhaps an autograph by the artist himself, that reads “Faict par decourt 1578.” Decourt was a master miniaturist and in-house painter for Charles de Bourbon, Prince de la Roche-sur-Yon, in 1553 before going on to become court painter to Mary Queen of Scotts, widow of King Francis II of France, in 1562. He was in England in 1565-6 where he painted Queen Elizabeth I and her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. He was appointed Peintre du Roi by King Charles IX of France after the death of François Clouet in 1572.

When Charles IX died of tuberculosis in 1574, he was succeeded by his 22-year-old brother Henry. As the fourth son of King Henry II, young Henry never expected to inherit the French throne. He had been deemed an excellent candidate for the throne of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, however, bringing French military and financial support to the table. Polish nobles elected him to the throne in 1573. He was crowned on February 21, 1574. His brother died without legitimate male issue in June. Not even six months after taking the throne, Henry ditched Poland and hightailed it back to France to claim the big prize.

He reigned for 25 years, impressive longevity in the turmoil and back-biting of the Wars of Religion. In the end, he had too many enemies to die in his sleep. He was the first King of France to be assassinated, stabbed to death in 1589 by a Catholic League partisan.

The life – and in particular, the sexuality – of Henri III has long been discussed and debated by historians. 16th century writers often referenced his fondness for wearing women’s clothing at court entertainments and for his male companions, dubbed at the time ‘mignons’, who slavishly copied the king’s dress. Indeed, the contemporary diarist, Pierre de L’Estoile’s (1546-1611) description of the mignons – who wore “their hair long, curled and recurled by artifice, with little bonnets of velvet on top of it like whores in the brothels, and the ruffles on their linen shirts [ruffs] are of starched finery and one-half foot long, so their heads look like St John’s on a platter” – could equally be applied to the fashions worn by Henri in this miniature.

It was also L’Estoile who commented on the king’s own fondness for cross-dressing: “The king made jousts, tournaments, ballets, and a great many masquerades, where he was found ordinarily dressed as a woman, working his doublet and exposing his throat, there wearing a collar of pearls and three collars of linen, two ruffled and one turned upside down, in the same way as was then worn by the ladies of the court.”

This delicate, sensitive and incredibly realistic likeness of Henri III contains all the hallmarks of Decourt’s style, in the extraordinary meticulousness of the details, the particular attention paid to the clothing, the jewels treated in volume with their cast shadows, the incredibly lifelike, modelling of the face (which is slightly pale) and in the artist’s habit of placing the reflection of light in the pupil of the eye, rather than the iris as Clouet did.

Researchers are following the trail of this extraordinary piece, trying to trace how a previously unknown royal portrait miniature wound up in England. One likely hypothesis is that it was spirited out of France during the Revolution, Pimpernel-style. Henry III wasn’t all that popular with royalists; he certainly wasn’t with revolutionaries, and very few of his portraits survived the anti-monarchical iconoclasm of the period.

Philip Mould is giving the Louvre first crack at buying the portrait which was likely painted in the Louvre itself when it was a royal palace.