Crossroads Roundup: the Case of a Missing Botticelli, Bone Biographies, and Stubborn Fairies

Our favorite stories on art, archaeology, folklore, and more from this past week.

Welcome to the Crossroads Roundup! This is our weekly roundup of news related to history, art, archaeology, and anything else that our readers might enjoy. In the future, the Crossroads Roundup will be for paid subscribers only, so if you haven’t already, you can sign up by clicking below:

Botticelli’s Virgin and Child found by Italian officials. Via the Carabinieri for the Protection of Cultural Heritage.

A Botticelli painting worth over $100 million was found in a family home outside of Naples.

The painting depicts the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, and is dated to the 15^th century. Sandro Botticelli’s lover, Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, sat in to model as the Virgin Mary. (She was also the model for his masterpiece, the Birth of Venus.)

But how did this painting, thought to be lost for 50 years, end up in someone’s house? I must confess, dear readers, that when I first came upon this headline, I conjured up images of a daring, Ocean’s Eleven-style heist. But it turns out that this w…