Curious Objects

In this Curious Objects episode, host Benjamin Miller is joined by New York Times photo editor and writer, Anika Burgess to discuss a very significant daguerreotype and the history of photography.

In this episode of Curious Objects, host Benjamin Miller is joined by Art Historian and author extraordinaire, Verity Babbs to talk about the wondrous world of William Morris’s wallpaper.Verity Babbs received a degree in Art History from Oxford University and also works as a stand up comedian. With this unique career blend, she aims to demystify the study of art and talk about the elitism that has surrounded the field in the past.Verity also has an Instagram series where she visits antique shops and thrift stores to find significant objects with interesting stories.

This is an episode worthy of going into the "rock" star hall of fame - get ready for an exciting hour about the Hope Diamond! Host Ben Miller is joined by Melise Ozkardesler to discuss this curious object, its history and the world of collecting ancient gemstones.

Join Curious Objects host, Benjamin Miller in a conversation with Genevieve Wheeler Brown, the author of Beyond Blue and White to talk about the history of Delftware ceramics through the female lens. We learn about the fantastic women who made these coveted ceramics and understand the humor behind these fascinating pieces of decorative arts.

In this episode, Host Benjamin Miller is joined by Laura Kugel of the Galerie Kugel in Paris to discuss the fascinating art of enameling from Limoges, France. Described by the poet Théophile Gautier in 1866 as “the immarcescible (indestructible) enamel”, these objects from the Renaissance still look as fresh today as they did when they emerged from the kiln all those years ago.Coveted by the likes of Givenchy, J.P. Morgan and Yves Saint Laurent, these objects remain popular even today. Listen in to learn more about these delightful creations..

In this episode, the fine line between obsession and madness, illustrated in a piece of furniture. Toledo Museum of Art curator Erin Corrales-Diaz joins Ben to discuss a unique secretary desk which might hold the world record for inlay: thousands upon thousands of pieces of wood, which in its maker’s own words, “will do more in ten minutes to inspire young people with the possibilities of life than ten years of haphazard and scattered endeavor.

This episode brings two Curious Objects veterans and one first-timer back to the show to discuss the groundbreaking exhibition they've curated, Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence. Our object is a fine neoclassical table made in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1819, by a firm where enslaved cabinetmaker James worked. Ben and his guests explore some of the misconceptions around enslaved craftspeople, the complicated relationships they often had with their enslavers, and what this table can tell us about all of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may know Mary Randolph Carter (who goes by the name Carter) as the longtime director of Ralph Lauren. But she is also a savvy collector, and an eloquent exponent for the art of the same. Her latest book, Live With the Things You Love, and You'll Live Happily Ever After, delves into private collections the world over, drawing connections between environments full of interesting objects and the good life. In this episode Carter expounds on objects in her own collection, from the odd “Jello Rock Clock” to the sublime painted-plaster-and-wood Statue of the Blessed Lady. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Ben Miller welcomes Keith Gerchak and Marisa Guterman, makers of the upcoming film Lost and Found in Cleveland. Featuring beloved stars like Martin Sheen and Jon Lovitz, along with *checks notes* “Constipated Appraiser” (Denise Dal Vera), the film follows a cast of characters intertwined with and connected to the world of antiques. Miller, Gerchak, and Guterman dig into the nitty-gritty behind the picture, the post-industrial American Dream in the Midwest, and the inspiration aplenty that came from Antiques Roadshow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's kinetic sculpture, it's haute couture, it’s . . . armor! This month, Ben speaks with Chassica Kirchhoff, an assistant curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, about a suite of metal suits from the 1500s that were worn and jousted in by the dukes of Saxony. Emblematic of the feisty Protestant state’s chivalric past and supreme examples of Saxon metalworking prowess, by the 1700s the suits of armor had come to represent “a fulcrum between the early modern past and the Enlightenment present,” Kirchoff says. Shortly thereafter they went on display at the famous Green Vault in Dresden, a precursor of modern museums. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Ben Miller introduces the Fine Objects Society, a new “association of forward-thinking professionals and enthusiasts who share a devotion to fine handcrafted historic objects” of which he is president. Officers Brenton Grom, Bailey Tichenor, Sarah Margolis-Pineo, and Benjamin Davidson, all former guests on the podcast, are on hand to detail the goals of this exciting new endeavor in the antiques field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And in the antiques world the sincerest form of imitation is reproduction: the humble and studious attempt to conserve the lessons of the past because of their timeless value. One firm that’s well-versed in this particular form of historical homage is James Robinson, Inc., whose hundred-year partnership with a legacy silver workshop in Sheffield, England, has resulted in what host Ben Miller calls “the best historical-style silver flatware being made today anywhere in the world.”In this throwback episode, James Boening, director of James Robinson, Inc., and Craig Kent, workshop manager in Sheffield, come on the pod to dish about the vital importance of age-old processes like annealing, and the irony that homeowners would run themselves ragged trying to decide which rug to buy, but will settle for cold, unbalanced steel tableware without even blinking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Ben Miller speaks with knit maven Heavenly Bresser, founder of the store Heavenly Knitchet and devotee of ye olde spinning wheel. The pair gets into the mechanics of spinning wheels, the form’s centuries-old history, and the largest wheel in Bresser’s extensive collection, which is also her favorite: a pendulum wheel manufactured by Justin B. Wait in the 1800s, whose drive wheel is 46 1/2 inches in diameter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode with Claremont Rug Company, president and founder Jan Winitz and Ben Miller explore myths about rugs, and the symbolic meanings of colors in rugs and importance of signatures. Winitz introduces his Oriental Rug Market Pyramid, which categorizes rugs from high collectible to reproduction levels, illustrating this and other points with four Persian Ferahan Sarouks, each of which represents a different quality level and degree of rarity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In part one of a two-part episode with Claremont Rug Company, president and founder Jan Winitz gives Ben the goods on the first Oriental rug he ever acquired. Made on a vertical loom over the course of nearly a year by a group of women, its imagery includes dragons (for the masculine principle of the cosmos) and phoenixes (for the receptive, earth-rooted feminine principle). It made such an impression on Winitz that he’s never attempted to sell it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week’s episode, Ben Miller speaks with Emelie Gevalt, curatorial chair for collections and curator of folk art at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. On view starting September 13 at the museum is the exhibition Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art, and Culture, an exhibition co-curated by Gevalt, who has brought along one special example to discuss: a nineteenth century painted-wood Game of the Goose board. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week’s episode, Ben Miller speaks with Annamarie Sandecki, who describes herself as the “semi-retired former director” of the Tiffany Archives, and Medill Higgins Harvey, curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the light table are a curiously shaped creamer and equally curious sugar bowl, the first in the shape of a frog and the second shaped like a pufferfish. Both were made by Tiffany under the aegis of design director Edward C. Moore, whose personal collection of decorative arts objects from around the world served as an inspiration to Tiffany in the later 1800s, and is the subject of a current exhibition at the Met, Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany and Co. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week’s episode, host Ben Miller speaks with Sarah Margolis-Pineo about a turning chair prototype made at the Mount Lebanon Shaker community. But don’t sit in it. Looking like a Wendell Castle sculpture avant la lettre, its bird-bone-thin spindles and threaded metal swivel mechanism are too delicate to support the weight of a full-grown adult. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ANTIQUES has a new editor in chief! Mitch Owens, formerly of World of Interiors, joins Ben Miller on this special episode to give listeners an inside look at his art and design philosophy, and his plans for the magazine. Sneak preview: when Ben asked what would be the salvation of the antiques world, Mitch replied that it’s essential to inspire collectors to acquire objects “promiscuously.” “People love things, people are magpies, and I think we should do everything in our power to encourage these explosive affairs of the heart,” he says, even if they occur across diverse collecting categories. An example of our editor’s own “promiscuous” taste is this week’s curious object: a copy of a fifteenth-century enameled and gilded wedding cup made by the Murano glass-making family Barovier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Ben digs into the history of Beauport, the Gilded-Age mansion perched on a rock ledge overlooking Massachusetts’s Gloucester Harbor. Built by Henry Davis Sleeper, one of the country’s first interior designers, it was conceived as a house-sized Valentine for the statesman and economist Piatt Andrew, the object of Sleeper’s (unrequited) affections. Vin Cipolla, president and CEO of Historic New England, which stewards the house today; the institution’s curator of collections Erica Lome; and writer and curator R. Tripp Evans feature.Additional music by@JackIsidore@SamGriffinGuitar Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration funded an interracial labor program in Wisconsin that employed over five thousand women to craft handmade goods: the Milwaukee Handicraft Project. Especially noteworthy among the rugs, quilts, costumes, and books that the women produced is a run of exquisitely crafted and clothed toddler-sized dolls. Host Benjamin Miller learns from scholar Allison Robinson about how these dolls—made to represent different ethnic groups both foreign and domestic—provide insight into New Deal–era debates over women’s labor, race, and cultural nationalism . . . and into the origins of Barbie and American Girl. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on our Curious Objects podcast, host Benjamin Miller is joined by Marina Wells to discuss scrimshaw. Whalebone, teeth, and other products of the sea adorned with nautical scenes and remembrances of home, scrimshaw is a portal into the lives and daydreams of whalers confined for months at a time aboard bobbing, blood-and-blubber-spattered boats. Under discussion in this episode are a pair of sperm whale teeth bearing depictions of what look like female pirates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Ben is joined by Dan Rubinstein, design journalist and host of the Grand Tourist podcast, to discuss TRENDS. But first of all . . . do they even exist anymore? Or are we living in a post-trend world ruled by the math of the algorithm and the magnetism of sui generis celebrities? Ben and Dan consider trends through historical and pop-cultural lenses, using a very curious object as the jumping-off point: a pewter brooch in the shape of a Norse shield designed by Jorgen Jensen, son of Scandinavia’s trendiest modern silver maker Georg Jensen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Part 2 of a special two-part podcast, host Benjamin Miller speaks again with Peter Siebert, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Independence Seaport Museum, this time about a Revolutionary War–era naval signal book made for English Admiral Richard Howe. “Prepare to haul to the wind together on the starboard tack when in order of battle, and the ships are to haul to the wind forthwith when the admiral fires a third gun” and other such recondite orders fill this hand-printed and watercolored volume, belying its usefulness as an eminently modern tool of warfare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Part 1 of a special two-part podcast, Curious Objects’ host Benjamin Miller speaks with Peter Siebert, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Independence Seaport Museum about a folk art watercolor from the late 1700s that’s been the subject of a major research project. Called Navigation Lesson, the painting is believed to depict the artist, Cornelius van Buskirk, receiving instruction from Commodore John Barry (1745-1803), the man regarded as the father of the United States Navy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week’s episode, Ben Miller speaks with Elena Kanagy-Loux, lacewear trendsetter and co-founder of the Brooklyn Lace Guild. The focus object is a seventeenth-century Italian handkerchief, but Ben’s and Elena’s conversation also touches on that time she worked for Courtney Love; good (and bad) representations of lace and lace production in cinema; and Refashioning the Renaissance, a five-year project to investigate popular dress trends and meanings in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Romanov dynasty was wiped out in 1918 . . . but what happened to all their stuff? Well, some of it ended up at Heritage Auctions, whose Imperial Fabergé and Russian Works of Art auction on May 17 hopes to move a treasure trove of ikons, furniture pieces, diaries, and gold-encrusted baubles. To discuss the sale—and in particular a Fabergé bonbonnière given to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna—Ben Miller welcomes guest Nicholas Nicholson, specialist in Russian works of art at Heritage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the newest installment of our advice series, Ben Miller speaks with Jordan Heres, co-founder with his wife, Ingrid, of the Charlottesville, Virginia, rug purveyor Weft and Wool. The focus object is a rug from Karaja, Iran, made in about 1900, but Ben’s and Jordan also tackle such subjects as how often a rug should be washed, why you should never use a beater bar when vacuuming a rug, and where the best rugs can be found (spoiler: it’s Istanbul, but the runner-up might surprise listeners). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special throwback episode, Benjamin Miller speaks with Ellery Foutch, assistant professor of American studies at Middlebury College, about a “relic Windsor chair” assembled by Henry Sheldon (founder of the Middlebury museum named in his honor) in 1884. This unique piece of furniture was built with fragments of wood salvaged from structures with local or national significance—such as the warship Old Ironsides, the William Penn House in Philadelphia, and a colonial whipping post. (Look here for a full list of the chair’s components.) And thanks to Foutch’s and her student’s efforts, the nineteenth-century chair now has a twentieth-century twin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this Curious Objects Bites episode, Benjamin Miller examines an 1830s manuscript tune book from rural Vermont. Bound crudely in leather, this book of sacred music was made by a farmer named Bernard Ward as a gift for his grandson, and many years later passed into the major collection of musical instruments, books, scores, and ephemera assembled by Frederick R. Selch. Filling Ben in on the details of this unusual item is Brenton Grom, executive director of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum in Connecticut. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Romney, co-founder of rare book dealer Type Punch Matrix and a frequent guest on Pawn Stars, returns to our podcast Curious Objects this week. She has with her a mid-nineteenth-century abecebestiary, or calligraphic treatment of the alphabet with animal motifs, made by Englishman Charles Eduard Stuart . . . except that wasn't really his name. Charles Manning Allen and his brother John, known as the Sobieski Stuarts, were eccentric book publishers who claimed to be descendants of Stuart claimant to the throne Bonnie Prince Charlie. Volumes produced by the pair such as Romney’s abecedary, what she describes as “Book of Kells meets M. C. Escher meets Game of Thrones,” and bogus guides to Scottish tartans and clans found a ready audience in romantic Victorian England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greg Cerio, editor of The Magazine ANTIQUES, died Saturday. In this special episode, Ben pays tribute to the man who gave Curious Objects the green light, and who foresaw a rich future for objects from the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Glenn Adamson returns to the pod to discuss an exhibition he co-curated at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York. Worlds Within: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu focuses on the work of the Okinawan-American ceramicist, which bridges the gulf between art and craft. In this inaugural installment of Curious Objects Bites—bingeable conversations about fascinating things for the busy listener—Adamson details a “closed form”: a Takaezu pot that confines a bead that rattles around inside. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taylor Thistlethwaite, proprietor of Thistlethwaite Americana in Middleburg, Virginia, returns to the pod to defend the merits of “brown furniture.” Whether it’s earthy, richly figured black walnut or the sometimes-overlooked black cherry, it’s important not to “think of wood as just something brown,” Taylor says. “There’s so much life in it. And it matures like fine wine.” Case in point: Taylor’s three-hundred-year-old chest-of-drawers with chunky hardware and unusual feet that is as beautiful as it is rare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you ever start to feel like history is abstract, spend a little time with an object or two that were actually there. For instance, a silver bowl and a pair of candlesticks that once belonged to New York grandees Pieter and Elizabeth Delancey, which suddenly reappeared recently after being lost for three hundred years. In this special rerun of one of Curious Objects’ most popular episodes, host Benjamin Miller revisits the obscure journey made by these three storied objects, with the help of Debra Bach, curator of decorative arts and special exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, Tim Martin, owner of S. J. Shrubsole, and Delancey heirs Dan and Alice Ayers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last month Benjamin Miller made a guest appearance on Art Slice, hosted by the podcasting power couple—and artists and art historians—Stephanie Dueñas and Russell Shoemaker, and now available here. The trio’s conversation focuses on a dazzling group of mixed-metal wares made by Tiffany and Company in the latter part of the nineteenth century, including such standouts as an 1879 chocolate pot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a coffee pot shown at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Of special interest is the former object’s patinated copper elements, produced by an alchemical technique that was a closely guarded trade secret during the most fertile period of the silver firm’s history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How much should you spend? What kind of stone should you get? Is antique better than modern? These are just a few of the many questions that any courter must consider when ring-hunting. Here to share his ring lore on this special Valentine’s Day episode is a true jewelry expert, Matthew Imberman of Kentshire Galleries. First things first: don’t worry about cursed jewelry. In Imberman’s experience, it’s usually not. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1909, Daisy Makeig-Jones was hired by the Wedgwood firm in Staffordshire, England, to decorate pottery. She would go on to develop the “Fairyland” luster pattern, which combined dazzling iridescent glazes with motifs from fairy tales and would serve to revitalize the Wedgwood brand. Bailey Tichenor, one half of the duo behind Artistoric gallery, comes on the pod to discuss a mid-1920s example of Makeig-Jones’s work called Poplar Trees, which boasts depictions of cypresses and other trees, a Japanese bridge, and winding river on the outside; inside are elves, flowers, and a mermaid medallion set among sparkling waves of glaze, along with a hidden treasure: the designer’s monogrammed signature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In what has become an annual tradition, Curious Objects host Benjamin Miller capped off January with a panel discussion at the Winter Show. This year’s edition was named “Catching the Bug: Enriching Your Life Through Collecting,” and featured three distinguished collectors and the objects they live by and through. The Hawkes bowl belonging to conservator Lloyd Zuckerberg, interior designer Marcy Masterson’s Italian side chair, and the Etruscan hand mirror of artist and educator Thomas Lollar provide evidence not only of the discernment of their owners, but of some twenty-five hundred years of design history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the summer of 1966 the Beatles were in Japan, whirling through the first leg of what would be their final world tour. Hoping to forestall the dangerous excesses of Beatlemania, Japanese authorities confined the Fab Four to their hotel suite at Tokyo’s Hilton Hotel for almost the duration of their one-hundred-hour stay. Casting about for things to do, the Beatles fell to painting: each took upon himself to design one quadrant of an acrylic-and-watercolor artwork known as Images of a Woman, currently on offer from Christie’s as part of the auction house’s annual Exceptional Sale. The painting offers a novel look inside the collaborative practice of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, a story that Casey Rogers, senior vice president at Christie’s, elaborates on in this week's episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1543 Andreas Vesalius published a seven-part book that would become the foundational text of modern anatomy: On the Fabric of the Human Body. With it, the Flemish anatomist overturned more than a millennium’s worth of medical dogma, many of his breakthroughs coming while dissecting human corpses—a method of study unavailable to physicians of classical antiquity. Part education and part art, Vesalius’s illustrated anatomy is as respected today for its woodcut specimen drawings—flayed “muscle men” and skeletons who pose like figures from medieval paintings—as for its no-nonsense organization . . . and it might have been even better. In this week’s episode, Benjamin Miller speaks with Rhiannon Knol, specialist at Christie’s, which is currently offering Vesalius’s own annotated copy of his book’s second edition. Its margins dark with suggestions—in Latin—for transposition, rephrasing, and new contextual information, this fascinating document of medical history hints at what a third edition would have offered, if not for Vesalius’s untimely death in 1564. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week’s episode, interior designer Tara McCauley gives listeners an inside look at her practice, which she likens, curiously, to a travel agency. She says: “I like to think of myself like I’ve gone into the market and I’ve done the research and I’ve talked to the experts and the locals and I’m bringing you the best kind of experience you’re looking for.” She's also brought along a small splatter-painted box by artist Thomas Engelhart, a veteran of the houses of Mugler and Hermès. For his series of handmade objets d’art in the shapes of pyramids, platters, obelisks, and disks, Engelhart has taken inspiration from porphyry, a material prized by the ancient Romans and employed in the construction of monuments and tombs—just one more instance of the fertile cross-pollination between the arts of the past and the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the past couple weeks we’ve been fielding and compiling questions that listeners have put to host Benjamin Miller. A taste: “Has any object ever truly baffled you?” “What’s the best town for antiquing?” and “Will Curious Objects ever do an adults-only episode?” This week’s episode represents a taste of his own medicine for Ben, usually the interviewer, and offered a chance for us at The Magazine ANTIQUES to learn a little more about what the Curious Objects community puzzles over. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A top-tier orchestra might well have tens of millions of dollars–worth of instruments on stage. Many of them are antiques. And there are few people who know these instruments more intimately than Paul Becker. He’s the fifth-generation owner and director of Carl Becker and Son, a 150-year-old luthier business in Chicago. He and his family have restored the most famous instruments in the world, and they’ve put violins, violas, and cellos in the hands of many of the world’s finest musicians. In a wide-ranging conversation, podcast host Ben Miller and Becker delve into all things stringed—from the the way the timbre of ancient violins compares to their modern counterparts (and competitors), the market for fakes, and the unique relationship between musician and instrument. Tune in for some great stories, and some great violin music, courtesy of special guest—and Ben's mom—Katherine Lehman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Conservative” by the standards of its day, the three-piece suit worn by American statesman and bon vivant Lewis Littlepage (1762–1802) at the court of Catherine the Great is sewn of silk and embroidered with sprays of blue, white, and grey flowers. Neal Hurst, curator of textiles and historic dress at Colonial Williamsburg, comes on our Curious Objects podcast to discuss this colorful garment in connection with Littlepage’s similarly colorful life—from contretemps with American Founding Father John Jay and service in the Spanish Army, to his career as chamberlain to Stanislaw II of Poland.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Benjamin Miller is joined by filmmaker Rachel Gould, better known on YouTube as the Art Tourist, to discuss Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire cycle of about 1834–1836. A watershed in the genre of landscape painting, Cole’s canvases use an allegory of empire—germination, prosperity, decline—to preach a cautionary tale about environmental and spiritual overreach. It was message delivered with earnest intent to the citizens of the young and ravenous American republic, and is hardly less relevant today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we travel back to the seventeenth century, to the glorious court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, in France, and his astonishing commission for a suite of ninety-three carpets to cover the 1440-foot-long Grande Galerie at the Louvre, then a royal palace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now the proud owner of three of these carpets—the creative work of court painter Charles le Brun and court architect Louis Le Vau, and handiwork of the Savonnerie Manufactory—and British decorative arts curator Wolf Burchard is on hand to discuss their convoluted history and the way in which they illustrate the baroque principle of variatas: that all things artistic be constructed along similar lines, while individually being unique and exciting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Ben speaks with three bigwigs of Gem X, an international club for jewelry aficionados. Founder Lin Jamison, Simon Teakle gallery director Christine Cheng, and returning Curious Objects guest Levi Higgs of David Webb discuss men in brooches, women in cuff links, and the fail-proof “smell test” for detecting real gold. These glitterati also have with them enchanting bijoux from their personal collections: a Van Cleef and Arpels Virgo pendant, Portuguese citrine and pearl brooch, and a pair of Flemish heart pendants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special throwback episode of Curious Objects, Ben Miller takes listeners on a virtual tour of the suite of beaux-arts abodes built for the Vanderbilts, Oelrichs, Astors, and Berwinds by the likes of Richard Morris Hunt and Stanford White. These houses—referred to as “cottages” by their nouveau riche owners—have been lovingly maintained by the Preservation Society of Newport County. The organization’s CEO and executive director Trudy Coxe, curator of exhibitions Ashley Householder, and curator of historic landscapes and horticulture Jim Donahue give Ben the lowdown on the almost three hundred years of architectural history preserved here . . . and, of course, the strife and scandal that stalked the lives of the houses’ owners (spoiler: murder and rosarian shenanigans abound). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Friend of presidents and billionaires, nemesis of Hitlerism, and helicopter skiing enthusiast, Kenneth Rendell is an antiquer who needs no introduction. But listeners hankering for more had best apply to Safeguarding History: Trailblazing Adventures Inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History, Rendell’s recently published memoir and the occasion for his conversation with Curious Objects’ host Benjamin Miller. On the docket in this episode is the role Rendell played in cracking the case of the forged Hitler Diaries, how he amassed twenty-five thousand rare books and manuscripts in just eleven months for Bill Gates’s personal library, and tips for determining the value and authenticity of precious objects, for collectors new and old. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices