He is best known for playing a ruthless mafia assassin in hit TV show The Sopranos, but it has been revealed actor Federico Castelluccio had a vital role in restoring an Artemisia Gentileschi painting damaged in the 2020 Port of Beirut explosion.

The actor, who played Furio Giunta in the award-winning crime drama, was called upon to pick up his brush by Getty conservator Ulrich Birkmaier who led the painstaking three-year conservation effort to restore the painting, Hercules and Omphale, which had been damaged by flying glass and debris.

Birkmaier told Observer.com he recruited the "amazing painter", who trained at New York's School of Visual Arts before becoming an actor, to help reconstruct a particularly badly damaged section of the painting around the foot of one of the figures in it.

He said: “The big toe was missing and parts of the tip of the foot were missing, as was some of the nose of Hercules and his proper right eye. So Federico made a painting of the foot and of his head. I used his painting as a guide for my retouching."

The restored painting is on show at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles until September 14.

The number of years a George Gower portrait of Sir Edward Monins of Waldershare had been in the same family until yesterday when it sold at auction at Bonhams in London for $1.5 million.

Given it took the French city of Nantes more than a decade to discover someone had stolen eight angels from its cathedral, perhaps it is not surprising it took another five years for them to apologize for the scandal.

The eight, two-meter-tall, lead seraphim were removed in 2009 from the spire of the Basilica of Saint Nicholas and replaced with copies and then promptly forgotten about until 2020 when one turned up at auction with an estimate of $22,400.

The city belatedly leapt into action, seizing the statue and another found in Spain, and is taking legal action to recover the other six.

An arrest has been made with a man expected in court in September charged with "breach of trust", while Nantes deputy heritage officer Olivier Chateau admitted there "was a lack of attention" paid but told the Ouest France newspaper it "could not happen again".

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice has opened a new multi-million-dollar conservation and restoration laboratory - and the public are invited.

Staff at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni are currently working to restore masterpieces by Robert Delaunay, Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock.

The laboratory serves as an extra wing of the gallery, with visitors able to get a close-up view of some of the restoration work, while it is also used to display sculptures not on show in the main galleries.

The fallout continues from Creative Australia's disastrous handling of its Venice Biennale commission with acting chair Wesley Enoch apologizing to Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino who were commissioned, dropped and reinstated in the space of five months.

He apologized for the "hurt and pain" caused to the pair, who were reinstated yesterday, and admitted their art had been "mischaracterized” after politicians raised concerns about some of Sabsabi's early work featuring images of a Hezbollah leader and the September 11 attacks.

The Lebanese-Australian artist rejected accusations his work promotes antisemitism or terrorism and is now officially back in favor for next year's event, but the affair has left serious questions about the public body that serves as the arts funding and advisory body for the government.

Juliana Engberg, who curated the Australian pavilion at Venice in 2007 and 2019, said it had to "renovate its board and leadership". She told the Sydney Morning Herald the controversy had been "one of the most disastrous and unfair episodes" in the organization's history.

Writing on Instagram, Max Delany, the former head of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, said it had been a "shameful episode".

1 - Amoako Boafo has taken over Gagosian's Burlington Arcade site in London for a group show called It's in the Little Things. The exhibition, which opens tonight and runs to August 29, also features work by artists including Aplerh-Doku Borlabi, Kwesi Botchway and Adjei Tawiah.

2 - Michelangelo Pistoletto's portrait of art dealer Lia Rumma is on show in her Naples gallery as part of his new show. Rivedersi (To See Oneself Again), which opens tonight and runs until July 18, features a series of portraits painted on mirrored surfaces.

3 - A group show, Are we going somewhere or just going, opens tonight at the Afikaris gallery in Paris. Work by artists including Nasreddine Bennacer, Saidou Dicko and Eva Obodo all feature in the show inspired by movement and migration that runs to August 9.