A Venetian cloth dyer’s son, Tintoretto spent his entire career in Venice, becoming widely considered the last great painter of the Renaissance.

The lagoon city’s churches and palazzi essentially serve as a permanent retrospective of this native son’s formidable talents in using dramatic color, bold brushstrokes and daringly innovative perspective on often-enormous canvasses.

Still, curators here have encountered challenges when mounting tributes this year to mark the 500th anniversary of his birth.

Some of Tintoretto’s paintings couldn’t be included in the main exhibition, hosted at the landmark Palazzo Ducale (Doges’ Palace), because they couldn’t fit through its 16th-century stone doorways.

And several Venetian churches, where the painter did much of his best work, balked at loaning their masterpieces. Not surprisingly, they are eager for visitors making the Tintoretto pilgrimage to visit their venues and not just the stellar show, which, since opening in September, has drawn more than 100,000 visitors.

​On to Washington

After it closes here Jan. 6, the exhibition travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington for a four-month run starting March 10. That will be the first Tintoretto retrospective outside of Europe.

When Venice last hosted a Tintoretto retrospective, in 1937, church paintings were cut out of their frames, rolled up and carted off to the exhibition. That method would be met with horror by today’s art world, especially since nearly a score of Tintoretto paintings were recently restored, thanks to the Save Venice organization.

“The churches generally felt, and we understood, it didn’t make sense to move his masterpieces across the city,” said Robert Echols, a Boston-based art historian who is one of the curators. Some of those church works will go to the U.S. exhibition, however.

Weeding out impostors

Some of Tintoretto’s greatest works can never travel, of course, and are being celebrated here.

In the Chapter House in the Scuola di San Rocco, admirers can lie on their backs to see Tintoretto’s work, which has been likened to the monumental achievement of Michelangelo in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. Thanks to new lighting and strategically placed mirrors, the Chapter House last month had its own renaissance of sorts. Now visitors can see details in what before had seemed like a gloomy, cavernous room.

Echols and co-curator Frederick Ilchman, chair of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, devoted much of their art historian careers to weeding out paintings that had been dubiously attributed to Tintoretto, whittling down what had been a list of 468 works to just more than 300 paintings of his authorship.

“Tintoretto, to some extent, is a painter who was a victim of his own success,” Echols said.

Tintoretto, a pseudonym of Jacopo Rubusti, obtained so many commissions, particularly in his later years, that he farmed out some work, notably to his son, Domenico. While his genius was acknowledged in his own day, some works done by imitators or his workshop had been incorrectly attributed to Tintoretto in successive centuries.

Tintoretto cleverly maneuvered to snag commissions from nobles and churches during the heady years of the sea-going Most Serene Republic of Venice.

“The Shakespeare play is not the ‘Merchant of Florence,’ it’s the ‘Merchant of Venice,’” Ilchman noted, recounting how Tintoretto sometimes offered discounts to ensure commissions didn’t go to his rivals, which included Tiepolo, Titian and Veronese.

Scandalous at times

Tintoretto’s imaginative use of perspective and his dynamic, inventive interpretations of mythological and religious themes are on convincing display, including one that sparked scandal in his day. In “St. Louis, St. George and The Princess,” a dragon’s head emerges from between the legs of a woman and from under her billowing, burnt-orange gown.

In the “The Abduction of Helen,” the kidnapped woman, with a nipple poking out above her blouse, seems to be tumbling out of the frame toward the viewer.

Tintoretto had an impressive production of portraits. The exhibition displays many of his finest in a long, narrow hall, as if in a noble family’s own palazzo.

Riveting self-portraits — one of Tintoretto in his 20s on loan by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and another of Tintoretto as an old man sent by the Louvre — open and close the retrospective.

The Venice show to honor Tintoretto’s birth anniversary began in 2018. The companion Washington show starts in 2019. The different years are fitting, for, while the year of his death, 1594, is undisputed, and his grave prominent in a Venice church decorated with some of his masterpieces, historians aren’t sure just when he was born. The artist’s birth year is often written as 1518/1519.
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During the Christmas season, nights are bright across the United States, as families, businesses and churches put up outdoor light decorations — a simple string of white lights along a roof edge, to elaborate displays with moving figures and music. VOA’s Deborah Block shows us a few of the beautiful light displays in the Washington area.
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A father-son business in Damascus, Maryland, is achieving success by restoring old, rusty cars into magnificent-looking vehicles. This is thanks to the work and inspiration of Bobby and Andy Cohen, who are featured in a multiseason television show “Junkyard Empire.” Maxim Moskalkov filed this report for VOA.
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When textile artist Porfirio Gutierrez works at his loom, or wanders through the picturesque mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, he often thinks about his ancestors. And the ancient skills they have passed down through the generations.

Zapotec — the place of gods

Gutierrez is a descendant of the Zapotecs, an ancient civilization originating in southern Mexico. For centuries, the Zapotec people have created intricate, hand-woven textiles. It is a tradition that Gutierrez and his family are continuing, with what he calls “functional works of art,” inspired by the natural world.

“One of my memories as a child is walking up into the mountains above the hill to collect the plants that my parents needed for making their dyes, almost like a pilgrimage,” he recalled. “They would tell us about the respect that we need to have towards our Mother Earth, as well as where the plants are growing, what colors they give us and the best time to collect them.”

These were basic principles in understanding how to work in harmony with Mother Nature, Gutierrez explained.

Journey with the threads

Using the bounty of Mother Nature gives the family’s handicrafts a warm, soft look and feel. The vibrant earth tones and symbolic designs are representations of their ancient culture.

In the past, such textiles would be used primarily as blankets, Gutierrez said, but starting in the 1970s, they began to be used mostly for rugs and tapestries. “These are pieces that could be used as a centerpiece, or wall art, or as a rug,” he said, while holding up a colorful, woven rug.

Native Art market

Gutierrez was speaking from his booth at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, which recently hosted a two-day Native Art market. It offered visitors a rare opportunity to purchase traditional and contemporary artwork by some of the finest Native American artists from across the hemisphere.

Other crafts on display at the market included silver and semi-precious jewelry, ceramics, fine apparel, handwoven baskets, traditional beadwork, dolls, paintings and sculptures.

Like Gutierrez, many of the artists shared how they, too, were inspired by nature for their work.

Comanche/Blackfeet

Traditional artist Jhane Myers, for example, uses elk teeth and buffalo bone for some of her jewelry.

“Each elk has two ivory teeth, so I do these necklaces, and they have buffalo bone beads,” she said, pointing to a long necklace she was wearing made of the ivory-colored materials. “I try to use all the same items that we used as a traditional Native people 200 years ago,” she added.

And just like her Comanche/Blackfeet ancestors, Myers and members of her community try to use every part of the animal. “Like the Buffalo and the elk, we use everything, not just the teeth,” she said. “We also eat the meat and tan the hide.” She creates dresses made from elk hides, and pointed out that there are a multitude of other uses for the animals they harvest.

Jemez Pueblo

Visual artist Kathleen Wall breaks clay out of the earth around Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, where she’s from, to make her signature dolls.

As she spoke from behind her booth at the art market, she was surrounded by dolls of varying sizes, each with their own serene face and individual paint job.

“This piece here, she is hand built from the bottom up and I use a coil technique,” she explained while cradling one of her dolls. After the coiling, which means arranging or winding something in a joined sequence of concentric circles or rings, she lets the clay dry, then scrapes and sands it and then uses a kiln for firing, she explained.

“Like so many Pueblo potters working today, I feel that I’m fulfilling my grandmother’s legacy, passing on the knowledge of Pueblo potter.”

Wall says she sculpts expressions of joy onto the faces of her Native clay figures, which is a reflection of the beauty of Native culture in and around her life.

Cherokee

Vivian Cottrell has been making baskets for 46 years, a skill inherited from her Cherokee ancestors.

“This is part of our culture, our heritage, our history. It makes us who we are,” she said.

She uses river cane to create her baskets, and natural plant materials to dye them. It takes her two days on average to boil the materials together in a large kettle, which gives her pieces a natural, earthy tone.

Spiritual connection

For the artists, being able to display their crafts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian — a place dedicated to Native American history and culture — was especially meaningful.

“This is really important for me to be in such a hallowed space,” Myers said. “It’s not only hallowed but it’s happy. And for me it’s so important to see my other fellow artists here because you have people from all different types of nations offering different types of art, so it’s like a family place; it’s almost like coming home.”

“I would say this is one of the most important institutions that aims to honor the traditional ways of arts, knowledge, wisdom, and promote it,” said Gutierrez. Like many artists, he fears that the time-honored traditions of their ancestors are in danger of disappearing.

“So I feel like I need to contribute to their preservation,” he said. “And the only way to preserve it is to actually employ these old ways of making the arts, and teaching younger members of the community about our ancient traditions.”

Gutierrez said he is also grateful for institutions like the Smithsonian for celebrating and honoring Native people, and for creating opportunities for them to promote their work.

The museum, a short distance from the U.S. Capitol, has been holding the annual market since 2006. Hayes Lavis, the museum’s cultural program specialist, says his hope is that visitors will take away from the experience of the art market “a realization of the contributions of native people to the Americas.”

“They were here first, they’ve always been here, they’ve gone through a lot of adversity and they are still thriving, strong, creative cultures,” he said.

The art represented in the market doesn’t just reflect the beauty and rich history of Native cultures, but the strength and resilience of the people themselves.
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Scientists have discovered a colorful “underwater garden” at depths of up to 2 kilometers during a recent research voyage south of Tasmania in Australia.

The researchers used special cameras to probe 45 undersea mountains, finding more than 100 unnamed species of corals, lobsters and mollusks. The expedition also discovered bioluminescent squids, deep-water sharks and basketwork eels.

Experts spent a month onboard the research vessel Investigator, which is operated by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or the CSIRO. It is an independent Australian government agency responsible for scientific research.

Scientists have been exploring the Tasmanian cluster of ridges known as seamounts in Australia’s Tasman Fracture and Huon marine parks.

The coral they found is soft, which means it is different from the coral in a tropical reef.

The expedition’s chief scientist is Alan Williams from the CSIRO.

“Quite amazingly at these kinds of depths there are coral reefs that in many ways look similar to the kinds of reefs you see in shallow tropical areas, and so what we were seeing on our screens delivered in real time from the cameras were just absolutely fantastic images of these extensive, delicate, colorful and very rich coral reef systems,” he said.

The research teams also saw images of the lasting damage inflicted on the ocean-floor by fishing crews. Trawl fishing was banned in the 1990s but much of the region’s coral is still to fully recover.

Experts say science knows more about the surface of the moon than it does about the deep sea. Despite their research south of Tasmania, they still do not understand why bright corals can survive in a pitch-black world far beneath the surface of the ocean.
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The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington recently hosted a two-day art market offering visitors a chance to purchase artworks by some of the finest Native American artists from across the hemisphere. The hand-crafted items in traditional and contemporary styles included silver and semiprecious jewelry, ceramics, fine apparel, handwoven baskets, traditional beadwork, dolls, paintings and sculptures. VOA’s Julie Taboh spoke with a few of the artists about their work.
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A combination of ice, snow, lights and exciting acrobatics are what characterize “Crystal,” Cirque du Soleil’s new show, which opened in Washington recently. Iacopo Luzi went behind the scenes of this unique display of acrobatics to learn the troupe’s secrets for putting on a show.
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This time of year, all across the United States, empty lots are turned into miniature forests as live Christmas trees are displayed for sale. But The Christmas Tree Promotion Board worries that more Americans are opting for artificial trees as they become more realistic-looking. So Christmas tree farmers in the U.S. have launched a social media campaign to get Americans to buy real trees this season. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Some three tons of African ivory sat in an unmarked crate in a Cambodian port for more than a year, until a tip from the U.S. embassy led authorities to break it open this week and discover the country’s largest-ever haul of trafficked ivory. 

Port laborers who recently gathered outside the facility told a reporter that no one had ever showed up to claim the valuable cargo. 

“There are 12 containers and one container consists of elephants tusks packed in sacks and some sacks loading rocks which look like marble,” said a laborer who witnessed the seizure at the Phnom Penh Autonomous Port Container Terminal on Thursday last week. 

He asked not to be named since he is afraid of being identified by port authorities. 

“I think they [authorities] wanted to know [who] the owner is, but perhaps the owner knew and didn’t appear,” added the laborer.

A smartphone photograph provided by the worker shows hundreds of elephant tusks, some cut in two, sitting on a cement floor near the containers. 

U.S. tips lead to seizure

Emily Zeeberg, the U.S. Embassy spokesperson, said American officials provided information to the Cambodian Customs and Excise Department that ultimately led to the search of a sealed container and to the seizure of 1,026 cut and whole pieces of ivory weighing approximately 3,370 kilograms. 

“The ivory originated from Mozambique. Cambodia is a transit hub; there is no information indicating that the ivory was intended to be sold here in Cambodia,” she said in an email. “The investigation is ongoing.” 

Ros Vanna, chairman and CEO of Kampuchea Shipping Agency and Brokers, also known as Kamsab, which grants customs clearance to foreign ships, said the port does not have rights to open the sealed containers immediately if the owner does not come. He said if goods are abandoned, a court must intervene.

“The owner didn’t appear to take [them] and then we sued to the court and open the containers,” he said. 

Sun Chhay, a director of the Customs and Excise Office at the port, told VOA Khmer that the owner of the containers apparently did not show up to claim the cargo because they feared the smuggling operation had been exposed.

“So far we don’t know whether the owner is Cambodian or foreigner,” he said. 

Chhay confirmed that the ivory was imported from Mozambique and shipped through Vietnam, where he said it was not checked because that country’s customs authority does not have the rights to check transiting cargo. 

He added that the next actions should be decided by his superior official.

Kun Nhim, general director of the General Department of Customs and Excise could not be reached for comment.

Ivory trade in Cambodia is ‘booming’

In December 2017, Cambodian authorities seized around 270 tusks at Cambodia’s southwestern port of Sihanoukville. In 2016, the country’s authorities also seized around 1.5 tons of ivory kept in containers in Phnom Penh and in 2014 Cambodian customs officials seized some 3 tons of African ivory in Sihanoukville as well. 

Paul Chambers, a political analyst at the College of Asean Community Studies at Naresuan University in Thailand, said Cambodia could be both a source and a transit country for the tusks.

“Cambodia has been an easy place to practice the international ivory trade because government enforcement is relatively lax,” he said. “Where there is money to be made, there will be buyers. That is what accounts for the continuing booming ivory trade in Cambodia or elsewhere in the world. The destination could be anywhere in the world, but it is so tragic that this trade continues,” he added. 

Meas Nee, a political analyst, said complex operations like ivory smuggling typically involve powerful people in Cambodia, even if the tusks are headed elsewhere. 

“I think Cambodia is just a transit only since we don’t really have law enforcement and there is also corruption as well,” he added. 

Save the Elephants, a UK-registered charity headquartered in Nairobi, issued new research in October this year, saying that Myanmar’s illegal ivory trade has been growing, with more exports headed to China.

The whole sale price for African raw ivory in late 2017 in the Golden Triangle region has remained stable at about $770 to $800 per kg since late 2015, according to Save the Elephants. Approximately 100,000 elephants in Africa were killed for their ivory in just three years between the years 2010 and 2012.

Between 20,000 and 30,000 African elephants are killed each year, according to the World Wildlife Fund 
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