On June 25 and 26, The Elegant Home sale at Bonhams Los Angeles will offer over 600 lots from the 17th through 21st centuries, representing a spectrum of diverse furniture, silver, decorative and fine arts. This sale presents an excellent opportunity for new and established collectors alike, with highlights ranging from Jean Puiforcat Art Deco silver flatware, a Richard Wehsner Vienna style porcelain tea service, Empire gilt and patinated bronze candelabra after Gérard-Jean Galle, to Old Master paintings. The public exhibition at Bonhams Los Angeles will be open (12pm-5pm) from June 22 to 24. Aileen Ward, Director, Silver & Objects of Vertu Department, commented: “We are pleased to present our second Elegant Home auction of the season, featuring fresh-to-the market American and European decorative and fine arts, nationally sourced from private collections and estates. From h

A painstaking restoration of the “Mystic Lamb”, a 15th-century Flemish masterpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, was unveiled on Tuesday, revealing a “much more expressive and intense” version of the central image of the giant altarpiece. Restorers from Belgium’s Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage began working on the altarpiece in 2012, but in recent months focused on removing the overpainting from the central part of the work which includes the head of the lamb. And the results were unveiled at St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent on Tuesday, with the restorers highlighting a number of surprising discoveries about the altarpiece, which is one of the world’s most stolen artworks. “The head is very different from what we’ve known since the 16th century. It depicts a lamb which is much more intense and expressive, which connects far more directly with the people, with big eyes,” restoration project leader Helene Dubois told AFP.

El Greco. Velazquez. Goya. Sorolla. Picasso. These are just some of the Spanish masters whose paintings are included in Spain: 500 Years of Spanish Painting from the Museums of Madrid. This summer, the San Antonio Museum of Art will present a dramatic survey of five hundred years of Spanish painting, stretching from the union of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in the late fifteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. Spain will contain more than forty works of art, the majority from major museums in Madrid, and very few of which have previously been on view in the United States. Organized in celebration of the Tricentennial of the city of San Antonio, the exhibition will convey the splendor of Spanish artistic traditions. This rich heritage is an aspect of what makes San Antonio one of the most distinctive places in the United States. Spain traces the continuity of specific Spanish pictorial traditions, including portra