Art Preservation

Sixty-seven years after it was installed in Inglewood, with great fanfare, and six years after it was removed for restoration, in deplorable condition, Helen Lundeberg's massive WPA mural "The History of Transportation" has a new home. The 60-panel, 240-foot-long artwork runs along a curved wall in the new Grevillea Art Park, close to Inglewood City Hall and High School.

KRAKOW, Poland -- No secret codes have come to light in a new digital examination of Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady With an Ermine," but the scan has revealed bolder hues, softer contours and other details lost in centuries of deterioration and touch-ups on the masterpiece.

A Mozart manuscript that was torn in half by his widow will be reconstituted this year as part of celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, the British Library said Wednesday. Mozart's widow, Constanze, tore the work in two in 1835 to boost its value, giving or selling the upper portion to a court musician, Julius Leidke. She sent the lower portion to a local government official in Bavaria.

Art conservators have had several centuries to figure out the nature of oil paint. They know how weather, humidity and chemical changes can affect it over time. They know how it oxidizes, cracks and turns yellow and how to clean it. Modern paints, made over the last 70 years with an ever-expanding array of synthetic products, are much more perplexing. Help is on the way in "Modern Paints," a symposium at Tate Modern in London today through Thursday.

The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's 16th century masterpiece, is in fragile condition but should not suffer too much damage if taken care of properly, experts who studied the painting closely said Tuesday. Scientists from Canada's National Research Council used special three-dimensional technology to examine both sides of the masterpiece, which was painted at some stage between 1503 and 1506 and now sits in the Louvre museum in Paris.

Experts fear that theft damage to Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream," one of the world's most famous images, may be too extensive to completely repair, according to a report to be released today. The painting and another Munch masterpiece, "Madonna," were recovered by police in August, two years after they were stolen from Oslo's Munch Museum by masked gunmen in a brazen daylight heist on Aug. 22, 2004.

THE book cost $2 million at auction, but large sections are unreadable. Some of its 348 pages are torn or missing and others are covered with sprawling purple patches of mildew. Sooty edges and water stains indicate a close escape from a fire. "This manuscript is, by far, the worst of any manuscript I've ever seen," said William Noel, curator of manuscripts for the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where it now resides. "It's a book that is on its last legs."

Custodians of Michelangelo's "David" are thinking of blasting air at dusty, sweaty tourists to stop them from sullying the Renaissance sex symbol. Months after a painstaking and costly cleanup of the 500-year-old nude statue, experts at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, Italy found dust and humidity brought in by streams of tourists had begun to tarnish their top crowd-puller again.

A monolithic public artwork has become a cultural irony in downtown Los Angeles. Despite its size, it is easy to miss by passersby. When it was erected in 1962, the 80-foot by 20-foot mosaic mural in front of the Los Angeles County Hall of Records stood as a glittery testament to the region's booming growth. Today the mural -- a highly stylized topographical map of Los Angeles County fashioned by one of the nation's best-known mosaic artists -- is dingy and decaying.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong's first words from the moon, speeches by President Woodrow Wilson and Gen. Douglas MacArthur and songs by Al Jolson, Muddy Waters and Nirvana are among 50 recordings being set aside for special preservation by the Library of Congress. The library on Tuesday announced the new selections for its National Recording Registry. News broadcasts include Wilson's speech of Nov. 11, 1923, celebrating the fifth anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.