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.

This year marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, diplomat, poet and author of the seminal Divine Comedy. In honor of the occasion, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence has digitized a rare set of illustrations of the Divine Comedy in high definition and made them available online for the first time. The 88 drawings illustrating the Divine Comedy were created by Mannerist painter Federico Zuccari in the late 16th century and few of them have ever been exhibited, and even then only twice, once in 1865 and once in 1993. Very little known but beloved by Dante scholars, the Zuccari drawings are widely considered the most important illustrations of Dante’s masterpiece until Gustave Doré’s burst on the scene in 1861.

Zuccari (also spelled Zuccaro) is best known today for having completed the frescoes inside the dome of Florence’s cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore (Vasari started them), but he was famous in his time and very much in demand by the crowned heads of Europe. His patrons included several popes, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots and Philip II of Spain. He was working King Philip, designing frescoes for the El Escorial palace north of Madrid, when he embarked on his illustrations of the Divine Comedy in 1586. It took him two years to complete all 88 drawings.

They entered the collection of the Uffizi in 1738, donated by Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, Electress Palatine, less than a year after she saved the Medici’s art collection for Florence in perpetuity. Today the pages are extremely fragile. They are kept in a dark, temperature and moisture-controlled environment and can only be exposed every five years. That makes them all but inaccessible to scholars as well as to the public, which is why the Uffizi has chosen to digitize them in their entirety so the works can be studied without putting them at risk.

The museum has compiled the digitized Zuccardi illustrations into a journey mirroring their original context in a bound volume. Zuccardi’s illustrations are on the right page; on the left are the verses from the Divine Comedy being illustrated, plus short synopses written by Zuccardi himself. The Zuccardi exhibition is currently only available in Italian, but an English version is imminent. Meanwhile, you can peruse the illustrations in each of three cantos —Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Already available in English is an exhibition exploring Dante’s connection to the visual arts and how the poet and his masterpiece were represented.

Underwater archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 16th century man and his kit at the bottom of Lake Asvejas in eastern Lithuania. The skeletal remains were found at a depth of 30 feet near Dubingiai Bridge, one of the longest wooden bridges still in use in Lithuania. Marine archaeologists uncovered bones, an iron sword, two knives with wooden handles and a spur. The armaments suggest the individual was a soldier. It is the first discovery of its kind in Lithuania.

This was not a burial. No evidence has been found yet indicating how he died, but whatever caused his demise, his body sank to the bottom of the lake. All of the bones were found in situ. Protected by a layer of clay and sand sediment, some of the young man’s accessories also managed to survive– his leather boots and fragments of a thin leather belt.

The lakebed was being surveyed before structural work replacing the bridge’s rotting wood beams with metal ones. Archaeologists and amateur divers worked together to survey the site. The remains were found during an inspection of the bridge’s supports.

A previous survey in 1998 had revealed that another bridge once stood in the same place, dating to the 16th or 17th century — around the time that the medieval soldier died, [marine archaeologist Elena] Pranckėnaitė added.

“For now, we assume that those discovered human remains could be linked with the former bridge leading to Dubingiai castle, which was situated on the hilltop on the shore of Asveja Lake,” she said.

The human remains have been recovered and now being studied at the Faculty of Medicine of Vilnius University. The archaeological material is being conserved and analyzed by experts at the National Museum of Lithuania.

Excavations at the Inca city of Tambo Viejo on the south coast of Peru have unearthed natural mummies of llamas that were ritually sacrificed and left as depository offerings. The discovery establishes Tambo Viejo, a new settlement founded in the Acari Valley by the Inca, as a regionally important locus of religious practice, an administrative center created by the Inca as a cultural foothold in a newly conquered area.

The Inca worshiped a diverse pantheon of deities connected to phenomena (thunder, rain), astronomy (sun, moon), the earth, topographical features (rivers, caves) as well as their ancestors. All gods and ancestors received sacrificial offerings and ritual offerings were performed very frequently. The most common sacrificial offerings were llamas and guinea pigs.

The llama was of enormous importance to the Inca economy, from their wool to their feces to their stamina and agility in carrying loads over mountains. The emperor in Cuzco frequently walked around with his white llama and the Inca Empire’s state herds are reported to have numbered in the millions.

They needed a large supply to keep up with demand for sacrifice. The Spanish chronicles described mass sacrifices in which hundreds of llamas were killed and their meat eaten in a community feast. They were sacrificed at planting time, at harvest time, to make it rain, to make it stop raining and in honor of ancestors. When things got really bad and big blood was deemed necessary to appease the gods, llamas were sacrificed by the thousands. There is archaeological evidence of mass animal sacrifices, including at Tambo Viejo.

Excavations in 2018 focused on two structures on the north end of Tambo Viejo. One brown llama was found in the center of the smaller building. It was a single burial. The larger building had four llamas (one brown, three white) buried in the center of the room. All had been buried under the floors with their heads facing the east. The llamas were all very young, neonoates to sub-adults.

The brown llama in the individual burial was missing its head and he was probably moved. The bones of infant camelids were seen on the surface in this area, so the building may have been rifled through by looters. There were more bones in the second building as well, so this was a larger sacrifice than just the mummified individuals.

The llamas were accessorized with long camelid fiber strings. The fibers were brightly died in red, green, yellow and purple and groups of each color were tied to the llamas’ ears at the tip like tassels. The llamas also wore string necklaces around their necks in matching colors. The longest strings (found on one of the white llamas) are 14 inches long; the shortest (found on the brown single burial) are three inches. The white llamas were also painted: a red dot on top of their heads and red lines from eyes to nose. They were buried with decorated guinea pigs, tropical bird feathers and food offerings including maize and black lima beans.

There is no evidence on the remains of how they were killed. Sacrificial llama remains found at other sites have shown signs of sharp cuts through the throat or into the diaphragm to remove the heart and fatal blows to the head. The Tambo Viejo llamas had their legs bent under them and were trussed up, so it’s possible they were buried alive.

Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal samples from the burials date the llamas to between 1432 and 1459. If the dates are accurate, that means the Inca took over the Acari Valley decades before 1476, the year when the conquest of the area was previously believed to have taken place.

As the Inka expanded from their Cuzco heartland, they interacted with groups who were culturally and linguistically diverse, and whose final annexation produced the great cultural fusion that characterised the Inka Empire (Morris & Thompson 1985: 24). The Inka sought to understand the economic potential of the lands and peoples brought into their empire, and to create reciprocal relationships with the newly conquered subjects.

The Inka presence probably disturbed the extant socio-cultural conditions, which the Inka attempted to normalise by befriending the locals and providing gifts and food to the conquered peoples, while also acknowledging the local huacas and gods. The Inka believed that it was not possible to take something without giving something back; this implied that the annexation of peoples and their lands required an exchange to normalise the otherwise abnormal situation. This was especially the case with groups who were annexed peacefully, such as the inhabitants of the Acari Valley. Inka recognition of local deities was a necessary step to guarantee a long-lasting relationship between the conquerors and the conquered. […]

It remains unclear whether the land within which Tambo Viejo was established had any earlier religious significance. It is evident, however, that the Inka either reinforced its religious connotations or transformed the location into one that was ritually important. As the evidence from Tambo Viejo illustrates, Inka rituals performed in the provinces aimed to project and magnify the importance of Inka ideology and religion, as manifested in the sacrifice of brown llamas to Viracocha and white llamas to the Sun. Such rituals conducted at Tambo Viejo therefore epitomised Inka imperial ideology. The llama and guinea pig offerings are the material manifestations of ritual celebrations performed at the site. Ultimately, all of these ritual acts enabled the Inka to legitimise their presence in the Acari Valley.