With its implication that the young woman isn’t as chaste as she should be, the marriage-prospect-derailing portrait triggers ducal panic and the deployment of the city-state’s best investigative ...

Six centuries ago, Italy boasted hundreds of varieties ... She realized that paintings were not just art, they were evidence, and not only evidence of fruit from hundreds of years ago.

Flowers, Italy, Joseph Stella, oil on canvas, circa 1930. The artist began painting flowers, he said, “to learn the secret of the vibration of their colors.” Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona ...