— Can — and should — technology right a historical wrong? That’s a question Italians have been asking since a facsimile of Veronese’s 16th-century “Wedding at Cana” was installed on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore a few weeks ago.

At the heart of the debate is the digital re-creation of this vast 1563 painting, which Napoleon’s forces removed from the refectory in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore 210 years ago and took back to France as war booty.

The facsimile, by the Madrid enterprise Factum Arte, is a stunningly accurate replica of the 732-square-foot canvas. Details are reproduced down to the most minute topography, including the raised seams rejoining the panels that Napoleon’s troops cut the painting into when they transported it to France in 1797. (The original hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris.)

SALEM, Mass. — You needn’t have read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel “The House of the Seven Gables” to appreciate the fine Salem house of the same name that was recently designated a National Historic Landmark.

The house has many attributes: important history, a picturesque site overlooking the Salem harbor, proximity to Hawthorne’s birthplace and an interior filled with 17th- , 18th- and 19th-century antiques.

In the book, an 1851 romance, Hawthorne begins, “Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns, stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables facing towards various points of the compass and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.” He then proceeds to make the house, “a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture,” a character in the novel....

The long-delayed Smithsonian television channel finally made its debut this week on satellite provider DirecTV. The launch ends a lengthy saga of fits and starts and controversy since the Smithsonian Institution first announced its exclusive deal with the Showtime Networks, Inc. to develop a television network nearly two years ago. Originally conceived as an on-demand digital channel, the network debuted on September 26 as a traditional channel with regular programming scheduled 24-hours a day.

However, it is hardly an auspicious debut. Thus far, DirecTV is the only satellite or cable provider in the country that has signed on to carry the Smithsonian Channel. And, since the channel is being broadcast solely in high-definition (HD), it is only available to DirecTV customers who pay an additional fee to receive HD programming and have HD equipment. Negotiations with additional cable and satellite companies are said to be ongoing. Despite the fact that the channel was...

There are ghosts haunting Marco Williams’s quietly sorrowful documentary “Banished,” about the forced expulsion of black Southerners from their homes in the troubled and violent decades after the Civil War. Dressed in what looks like their Sunday best, in dark suits and high-collar dresses, they stare solemnly into an unwelcoming world. A couple ride in a cart along a pretty country road, and others stand awkwardly before houses with peeling paint. There are few smiles. Photography was then a serious business, though being a black landowner, part of a fragile, nascent Southern middle class, was more serious still.

It’s stunning how loudly the dead can speak, and with such eloquence. I couldn’t help comparing these images with those in one of my own photo albums of a large family of stern-looking Midwesterners dressed in what looks like their Sunday best. The rough, ill-fitting suits and somber dresses look similar to those in the documentary, and the simple clapboard house...

Actress Sally Field is all set to play Mary Todd Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's long-gestating biopic Lincoln.

The film will be based on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's ˜Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

According to Hollywood Reporter, the movie may focus on the 16th US president's role in leading the North in the Civil War.

The newspaper also reported that Liam Neeson has been signed to play Lincoln in the movie.

Earlier, it was being speculated that Marcia Gay Harden could bag the character of Lincoln's wife.

The Smithsonian's controversial cable television programming will debut Wednesday, but right now only those with a specific satellite dish will be able to see it.

Subscribers to DirecTV, one of two main satellite TV carriers, will have access to the 75 hours of programming from the Smithsonian Channel, produced in cooperation with Showtime Networks, the network will announce today.

Several groups objected to the contract because the Smithsonian signed over to Showtime semi-exclusive rights to produce films built around the national institution's resources.

Since the deal was made public 20 months ago, Smithsonian officials have defended it as a way to make the museums accessible to more people and as a new source of needed money for the museums.

Members of Congress, who control the 70 percent of the budget the Smithsonian receives from the federal government and who also oversee its operations, expressed doubt about the arrangement from...

Sixty-two years ago, the greatest conflict in the history of humanity came to an end. Fifty to 60 million people had died. Many millions more were wounded or had lost their homes. Nations were shattered. The most appalling genocide ever had taken place. And for the first time, nuclear weapons had been used, raising the specter of human extinction.

Every way of trying to tell a story this vast carries with it blind spots, reveals its own assumptions and biases. Ken Burns'"The War" is no exception. But this magnificent 15-hour series will stand as one of the most extraordinary accounts of war ever made. Panoramic in its sweep, unflinching in its openness to all the faces of war, crafted with rare intelligence and sensitivity,"The War" is an epic achievement.

Burns' subject has always been America. From"The Civil War" to"Baseball," from"Jazz" to"The West" (for which he was executive producer), to"Thomas Jefferson" to"Mark Twain," Burns has sought out subjects that are deep in the...

He stayed in Paris when the Nazis invaded, keeping his head down and prompting claims that he must have collaborated with Hitler's regime. But, covertly, Picasso played a "brave" role in supporting the French Resistance, according to previously unpublished letters revealed this weekend.

Professor Peter Read, head of the French department in the University of Kent at Canterbury, has gained access to a collection of letters proving that Picasso actively and courageously supported the Resistance activist Robert Desnos, who was arrested by the Gestapo on 22 February 1944 and sent to Auschwitz. He died in Terezin concenration camp, days after the camp's liberation, still speaking about the help he'd received from the founder of Cubism.

One of the most widely recognised figures of 20th-century art, Picasso was denounced as a "degenerate" artist by Hitler. According to Professor Read, Picasso sometimes helped his friends and fellow artists by...

WHOEVER said that history doesn’t repeat itself never reckoned with Philip Glass. No, it is not a matter of musical repetitiveness, though there is plenty of that. In this case the motivation for a new Glass opera echoes that of a much older one, and both works loom large in the new season.

“Appomattox,” based on the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at the end of the Civil War, will have its premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Oct. 5. And in April the Metropolitan Opera will mount a new production of “Satyagraha,” a 1980 work inspired by Mohandas K. Gandhi’s early years as a lawyer and equal-rights advocate in South Africa.

Despite the nearly 30 years that separate the creation of these pieces, their connections run deeper than the coincidence that the roles of Lee in “Appomattox” and Gandhi in “Satyagraha” are being sung by brothers: the baritone Dwayne Croft and the tenor Richard Croft. The historical settings are not so far apart. Most of “...