Plus: Raphael’s Mary Magdalene, earrings fit for a Greek goddess, and a house museum gets its woodwork back.

J anuary’s been a cornucopia of news. First, it’s no surprise that the National Gallery and the Smithsonian are complying — so far, it seems — with Trump’s executive order to dismantle their DEI programs.

Race hustlers hoped the Smithsonian wouldn’t, since only half its money comes from Congress but it’s part of the Department of the Interior. The Smithsonian’s a DEI hotspot. In 2020, the Museum of African American History, otherwise a joy, got nabbed red-handed pushing a “perils of whiteness” syllabus for teachers visiting the museum. “Self-reliance,” “hard work is the key to success,” “be polite,” and “the scientific method” were, we would have learned if we were visiting children, racist tropes. A small scandal ensued, though it should have been a big one. A coat of whitewash was applied, and DEI at the Smithsonian went from flamenco to waltz.

With more than 20 museums, libraries, and a zoo, the Smithsonian isn’t a behemoth — a chaos monster — but it is a million moving parts and the kind of place where DEI can hide and thrive. Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian’s head, whom I admire, is 72. Many wonder how engaged he is these days. Since the Trump order, the Smithsonian has pruned lots of lingo from its key race-and-gender preference programs in hiring, training, and suppliers. Its head diversity officer, Beth Ziebarth, transitioned from imposing a full DEI menu on the world’s grandest museum to a job focused — at least on paper — on access for the disabled.

The Smithsonian is less a collection of museums and more a university like Yale or Harvard in that it’s massive and complex and DEI is deeply embedded. To excise it, first the shelves at Costco need to be emptied of metaphorical scalpels, pick axes, flamethrowers, and bludgeons. Command-and-control needs to come from the secretary of the interior.

Once USAID is hung, drawn, and quartered, DOGE should plumb the books at the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It might very well be as corrupt and as louche. Nobody knows what it really does.

This week, Christie’s and Sotheby’s were the places to go for Old Masters, and, at Christie’s, for the oldest of Old Masters. A group of ancient baubles sizzled at its antiquities sale on Tuesday, with earrings, necklaces, rings, a brooch, a hairpin, and a belt buckle selling well and showing us that high style is eternal.

A pair of Geometric Period Attic gold earrings from 750 to 725 b.c., estimated at a mere $10,000 to $15,000, soared to Parnassus heights, at $151,200. All prices include the buyer’s premium. They’re Granulation Style, which means the distinguishing design motifs are tiny drops of gold crafted and applied by eyes unaided by magnification, using technology lost for 2,000 years. The earrings must have belonged to either a royal or a drachma gazillionaire. The empty cloisons would have held enamels, the disks rock crystals. There are only two other pairs on God’s green earth. They came from a Swiss private collection. These dazzling little things, barely two inches, must have needed Artemis, Athena, and Aphrodite together to dodge the smelter.

This year is Joseph Mallord William Turner’s 250th birthday, so I’ll start the party with another long-hidden, hardly known bit of magic. The Approach to Venice, from around 1840, a watercolor with some red and brown ink, comes from Turner’s third and last trip to Venice. It’s among the group of Venice watercolors he kept for himself as souvenirs and meditations, though, bit by bit, they went into the marketplace and to British and Irish museums. Approach to Venice is an ethereal seascape, a dreamscape, really, with the Venice skyline in the distance as if a specter. Turner is among Impressionism’s precursors and important to Whistler, too, but he’s his own thing. I see it as a study in misty blue.

The watercolor was thought to be by John Ruskin and hasn’t been seen in public since the 1880s. But the paper is the same as what Turner used for his other Venice watercolors, so down the drain the Ruskin attribution went. With an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000, it sold for $327,000.

A Raphael portrait of Lorenzo de Medici sold at Christie’s in 2007 for $37 million, and a drawing, Head of a Young Apostle, went for $47.9 million in 2012 at Sotheby’s; so $3.2 million, on an estimate of $2 million to $3 million, sounds like a good deal for Raphael’s early, intimate, serene Saint Mary Magdalene, from 1503. At 15 by 5 inches, it was probably one of two pictures to flank a bigger painting or a sculpture and was used as a private devotional piece. Mary was the Bible’s most famous and notorious redhead, and this redhead went wild. Her hair is so long, it cloaks her body. Now, that’s a look I haven’t seen at the Met’s fashion gala and doubt I will since Mary is repudiating worldly goods.

Raphael, then only 20 and likely still based in Urbino, used the back of the picture to mix paints. His fingerprints are mixed in the dabs. The Sotheby’s picture isn’t exactly fresh meat. It has bounced from owner to owner over the past hundred years or so. Still, it’s a treasure. It’s tiny and considered juvenilia, but in it we see Raphael’s genius and his future.

Bernardino de’ Conti (1470–1523) isn’t a household name, but he was a powerhouse portraitist in Milan, Raphael’s contemporary, and so close to Leonardo that his Elegantly Attired Noblewoman in Profile was thought to be by Leonardo for years.

It’s from around 1500 but, unlike Raphael’s Mary Magdalene, this gal is not into repudiation. We don’t know who she is, but she’s wearing high-style Spanish lace and tassels made from gold and silver thread. She sports a luminous complexion and sits in commanding profile. Like the Raphael, it was estimated at $2 million to $3 million. It sold for $3.1 million.

The showpiece of this cycle of Old Masters sales was El Greco’s Saint Sebastian, from between 1610 and 1614 and estimated at $7 million to $9 million. Standing, nearly nude and pierced by arrows, this Sebastian was in El Greco’s studio when he died. Christie’s pulled it at the last minute after Romania’s government complained that it belonged to the nation via a bequest from King Carol I, who bought it in 1898. Wildenstein’s, the venerable art dealer, bought it in 1976, though we don’t know from whom. It could have been from Carol’s son, King Michael, deposed in 1947, or from the communist Ceauşescu regime, which ruled from 1965 to 1989, when a flurry of bullets, not arrows, dispatched Ceauşescu to the Hot Place. The Romanians will have a statute of limitations problem, especially since Saint Sebastian was displayed in a big, three-venue El Greco retrospective in the early ’80s. That was their chance to contest. Christie’s, the current owner, and the Romanians will tussle in the coming weeks. No bloodshed, guys, please.

In January 2021, I wrote about President Trump’s executive order issued, alas, after he lost the election, mandating Classical Revival designs for certain types of federal government buildings. This order had been percolating for two or three years in reaction to the array of carbuncles built over many years by the General Services Administration in Washington and pushed by architects committed to cutting-edge style or to old Modernist styles like Brutalism. Classical Revival didn’t mean just columns and pediments. Trump’s order also embraced Gothic Revival, Mission Revival, Arts & Crafts, and other traditional or vernacular styles.

Kudos to the National Civic Art Society, the nonprofit think tank promoting architecture that evokes democratic Greece and republican Rome. It was the brains and spirit behind the Trump mandate. It fights the good fight.

Architects hated the new rule, which cost them design freedom and money, and, horror of horrors, forced them to follow Trump’s aesthetic guidance. The General Services Administration, captured by architects and builders, hated it on command. President Biden voided it with the speed of a practiced hand pocketing a Russian bribe. The beacon light of industry capture, Biden didn’t have bad taste. He had no taste.

Well, the Trump rule is now back, among the pile of new executive orders signed on Inauguration Day. Architects still hate it. It’s regressive, they say, and it removes control from local communities, as if highbrow architects of big federal buildings ever care about those who have to look at the buildings or work in them. The more mentally far-flung among Trump’s critics say that classicism evokes plantation slavery and the Nazis, but they see slavery and Nazis under every metope and every volute.

Are these people crazy or just dumb? Classical style descends from Paestum, the Acropolis, and the Pantheon, not Simon Legree and Hitler. And if the federal government is the client, the client gets to dictate style. What’s wrong with the Lincoln Memorial? It’s beautiful, and it’s inspirational. Classicism — basically, the Greek Orders — is the country’s heritage style. And it’s far from uniform. Christopher Wren designed 51 churches in London after the Great Fire in 1666. They’re all Classical Revival. They’re all unique. What’s wrong with giving Classical Revival a try? Architecture schools will start focusing on it again. Creative minds will find new twists. The locals will be happier. And architects working on federal projects might enjoy their fresh liberation from glass, steel, concrete, and styles that chill and depress.

I’m a big believer in happy locals, and the good people of Edenton in the northeastern corner of North Carolina should be very happy indeed. Edenton’s Cupola House from the late 1750s, one of the South’s finest colonial houses and now a distinguished house museum, is starting to reassemble its original, lovely first-floor woodwork. The elegant paneling and moldings have lived at the Brooklyn Museum since 1918, when the museum acquired them from Cupola House for the walls of its own 18th-century period room. It’s a huge coup for Edenton, a prime example of intelligent restitution, and all done without firing a shot or a quiverful of arrows, filing a lawsuit, or mounting a riot.

When I visited the Brooklyn Museum two weeks ago, I learned that most of the museum’s superb, unique period rooms were closed. The museum plans to disassemble them, using the space for contemporary art and the art of the Americas.

Last year, the museum offered to return the Cupola House woodwork as a gift. In January, the museum announced that woodwork from the 1730s displayed in another period room is going to the Three Cultures Center in Dorchester, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It originally came from the nearby Trippe House, built in 1680 and now used as the rectory for a church.

I think the Brooklyn Museum will regret parting with its period rooms, or most of them. Together they teach the high points of American decorating taste over the centuries, and, goodness knows, people can use some guidance, especially young people who look at antiques as so much firewood. That said, the curators don’t want them and don’t know what to do with them. They’re lifestyles of the Dead White Oppressors.

Brooklyn’s desperate for money. It could have made Cupola pay for it. Cupola House is planning how to reinstall the paneling and moldings, since the gift implicates the entire first floor of the house. Once in place, all of it will look fabulous. I’m excited to see what they do.