Giant reproductions of Michelangelo’s David and the Venus de Milo are raising eyebrows in the Japanese town of Okuizumo because of their oversize nude bodies.

An art scholar suggests Michelangelo copied fellow artist Leonardo da Vinci in the design of a great gilded copper ball once placed atop Florence’s basilica of San Lorenzo. Vincenzo Vaccaro, an official with the Superintendence for Architectural Heritage of Florence, made the claim last week y in the Medici Chapels.

Plans were presented in Florence on Tuesday to mark the 450th anniversaries of the death of Michelangelo and and the founding of the Accademia delle Belle Arti that houses his David sculpture. David by the Italian artist Michelangelo is the masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created between 1501 and 1504.

Michelangelo’s The Holy Family, the famous round painting that resides in the Uffizi Gallery, has found a new home in the Florence institution. The work, which has since 1952 lived in Room 25 on the second floor of the world-famous art gallery, is now the centerpiece of a new hall dedicated to Michelangelo.

The original “crown” of the lantern which Pope Leo X commissioned Michelangelo to design and which sat atop the dome of the New Sacristy in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence until 2002, will be on display again as of today, in the crypt of the Medici Chapels.

Year of Italian culture in the U.S. opens in Washington. Italy’s foreign affairs minister will inaugurate The Year of Italian Culture in the United States event Wednesday with the loan of a Michelangelo sculpture to a major American gallery. Giulio Terzi will open the year-long event at Washington’s prestigious National Gallery of Art by unveiling the famous David-Apollo sculpture by Michelangelo.

Famed Florentine Renaissance crucifixes by Michelangelo, Donatello and Filippo Brunelleschi will go on show together for the first time in the Florence Baptistery from November 2 to 11. The crosses are being united for a heritage biennial organised by the Fondazione Florens.

The Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg (Virginia, USA) will held the exhibition “Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane Masterpiece Drawings From the Casa Buonarroti.” The exhibition, which opens at the Muscarelle on Feb. 9 and then travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in April.

An eight-ton gilded bronze door so splendid Michelangelo dubbed it the “Door of Paradise” will be unveiled to the public again after 27 years of restoration work. But Lorenzo Ghiberti’s 15th-century door which bears scenes from the Old Testament won’t be going back in its place on the baptistery of Florence’s duomo, or cathedral. Instead, starting on Sept. 8, it will go on display in a case at a Florence museum, the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, to preserve it from renewed damage.

It is shown at the Museum of the Bargello in Florence The “Crucifixion” attributed to Michelangelo. The Italian state had purchased the “Crucifixion” in 2008 for 3 million and 250 thousand euros from an antique shop in Turin. The Corte dei Conti suggests that they have paid too much, based on expert opinions that refer to a maximum of 700-800 thousand euros.