Blog

Jeddah · Saudi Arabia

Why Jeddah Was Built From Coral

A treeless port with no stone quarried its whole city out of the reef offshore — then oil and concrete let it walk away from the sea that built it.

Jeddah's old town isn't decorated with coral. It's made of it — reef cut soft from the water and hardened into towers. The strange part is what happened when the city no longer needed the sea.

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Animal We Drew Everywhere Once It Was Gone

From Neolithic rock to airline tailfin — how the Arabian oryx vanished from the desert, came back from nine animals, and multiplied everywhere as a symbol in the very decades it was gone.

The last wild Arabian oryx was shot in 1972. By then it was already a picture — carved on Bronze Age tombs, mistaken by the ancients for a unicorn, praised by poets as the eyes of the beloved. This is the story of an animal that went extinct in the wild and was brought back from nine survivors, and of the strange gap between the creature and the emblem it became: fast, sharp and ascendant on a nation's tailfin, while the animal itself survives by standing still in the shade.

Istanbul · Turkey

Seventy Thousand Solomons: The Empire That Performed a Legend

A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.

Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.

Marrakech · Morocco

Why Marrakech Is Red and Fez Is Ochre

Two imperial cities, one element in the ground — and the difference between a red city and an ochre one turns out to be half geology, half planning law.

Marrakech shows you the iron in its earth; Fez veils the same iron under lime. What makes each city relentlessly one colour, though, isn't the ground — it's what the twentieth century did to it.

Beirut · Lebanon

Women of Arab Abstraction

The letter set loose, the line woven, the arabesque the West once threw away — and the women who built modern abstraction out of all three, then got written out of it.

Abstraction is usually told as a Western invention that arrived elsewhere late. Saloua Raouda Choucair, Etel Adnan, Madiha Umar and a room of others tell it differently — often as the only woman in the movement, building modern form from the geometry, craft and calligraphy their own culture already held.

Marrakech · Morocco

The Hand That Everyone Named After Their Own

The Khamsa across North Africa — Marrakech, Tunis, Algiers — and why the oldest thing about it is the shape, not the story.

Everyone calls it something different — the Hand of Fatima, the Hand of Miriam, the Hand of Mary. One five-fingered shape, several holy names, each written onto it by a community that made it its own. From a carved hand over the Alhambra's gate to Kabyle silver, synagogue lamps and a boy on a Marseille motorway, this is the story of a symbol older than the names it carries — and shared by more people than any one of them.

Conserving Time-Based Media

How conservators keep video, film, software and installation playback working as tapes fail and display equipment goes out of production

Tate, MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Met keep video, film and software playable: they document artist intent, migrate analogue signals and decide which decks stay dedicated to the work. This guide covers formats, ingest, Variable Media strategies, how the specialism formed, and current costs for museums.

Preventive Conservation, Explained

How museums slow collection damage with climate, pests and risk, using sourced ranges rather than a single 50% RH target

Staff keep collections usable by managing climate, pests, storage and risk at room scale. This guide sets out ICOM-CC and AIC definitions, CCI’s ten agents of deterioration, and museum humidity, temperature and light bands with their source caveats. It covers risk ranking, historic-house limits, monitoring costs and when to hire a specialist.

Famous Restoration Controversies

Nine public disputes, chosen for a named conservation reason: overcleaning, amateur work, reconstruction ethics or missing records

Restoration fights are arguments about what a treatment removed, added or failed to record. This list sets selection criteria first, then walks nine documented cases from the Sistine Chapel and the National Gallery to Borja, Angkor Wat and Tutankhamun’s mask, with dates and 2026 locations checked against institutional sources.

Radiocarbon and Pigment Dating

How carbon-14, pigment first-use dates and tree rings date a painting, and why those laboratory results still cannot name the artist

A date on a painting is a date on a material: flax in the canvas, oil in the binder, a growth ring in a panel, a pigment that did not exist before a given year. This guide covers radiocarbon including the bomb peak, pigment terminus post quem, dendrochronology and lead isotopes, then the failure modes that keep a calendar from proving authorship.

Why Paintings Darken and Yellow

Linseed oil, aged varnish, dirt and unstable pigments each yellow or darken a picture, and cleaning reverses only some of those changes

Old pictures look brown for mixed reasons: soot, oxidised varnish, yellowed linseed oil, and pigments that have changed in the film. Conservators can lift dirt and later varnish in many cases. They cannot restore copper greens gone brown or lead white turned transparent. The chemistry, the history of noticing it, and the limits of treatment.

Infrared and X-Ray Imaging of Paintings

How infrared reflectography, IR photography, X-radiography and MA-XRF record underdrawings, paint structure and elemental maps

Carbon drawing absorbs infrared; lead white blocks X-rays; calcium and mercury light up on elemental maps. This guide sets infrared reflectography beside IR photography, X-radiography and MA-XRF: physics, a study protocol, the people who built the kit, and campaigns at the NGA, Rijksmuseum, Getty and Met.