M. Leutze is expected home from Germany in the spring. He left Philadelphia, the last time, nearly ten years ago. He will accompany his great picture of "Washington crossing the Delaware." Powers's statue of Calhoun, with the left arm broken off by the incompetent persons who at various times were engaged in attempting to recover it, upon being removed from the sea under which it had lain nearly three months was found as fresh in tone as when it came from the chisel of the sculptor. It has been placed in the temple prepared for it in Charleston. Mr. Ranney has completed a large picture representing Marion and his Men crossing the Pedee.
Kaulbach, according to a letter from Berlin in the November Art Journal, was to leave that city about the middle of October, in order to resume for the winter his duties as Director of the Academy of Munich. The sum which he will receive for his six great frescoes and the ornamental frieze, will be 80,000 thalers (12,000l. sterling) and this is secured to him, as the contract was made before the existence of a constitutional budget.
Homer's Odyssey furnishes the subjects for a series of frescoes now being executed in one of the royal palaces at Munich. Six halls are devoted to the work; four of them are already finished, sixteen cantos of the poem being illustrated on their walls. The designs are by Schwanthaler, and executed by Hiltensperger. Between the different frescoes are small landscapes representing natural scenes from the same poem.
If we credit all the accounts of pictures by the old masters, we must believe that they produced as many works as with ordinary energy they could have printed had they lived till 1850. The Journal de Lot et Garonne states that in the church of the Mas-d'Agenais, Count Eugène de Lonley has discovered, in the sacristy, concealed beneath dust and spiders' webs, the 'Dying Christ,' painted by Rubens in 1631. The head of Christ is said to be remarkable for the large style in which it is painted, for drawing, color, and vigorous expression.
A picture painted on wood, and purchased in 1848 at a public sale in London, where it was sold as the portrait of an Abbess by Le Brozino, has been examined by the Academy of St. Luke at Rome, to whose judgment it was submitted by the purchaser, and unanimously recognized as the work of Michael Angelo, and as representing the illustrious Marchesa de Pescara, Victoria Colonna.